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

Spoken language understanding research to date has generally carried a heavy text perspective. Most datasets are derived from text, which is then subsequently synthesized into speech, and most models typically rely on automatic…

Progress in speech processing has been facilitated by shared datasets and benchmarks. Historically these have focused on automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification, or other lower-level tasks. Interest has been growing in…

In the rapidly evolving landscape of spoken question-answering (SQA), the integration of large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a transformative development. Conventional approaches often entail the use of separate models for question…

To capture salient contextual information for spoken language understanding (SLU) of a dialogue, we propose time-aware models that automatically learn the latent time-decay function of the history without a manual time-decay function. We…

High-quality automatic speech recognition (ASR) is essential for virtual assistants (VAs) to work well. However, ASR often performs poorly on VA requests containing named entities. In this work, we start from the observation that many ASR…

The lack of speech data annotated with labels required for spoken language understanding (SLU) is often a major hurdle in building end-to-end (E2E) systems that can directly process speech inputs. In contrast, large amounts of text data…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), a core component of the task-oriented dialogue system, expects a shorter inference latency due to the impatience of humans. Non-autoregressive SLU models clearly increase the inference speed but suffer…

Document-grounded dialogue systems aim to answer user queries by leveraging external information. Previous studies have mainly focused on handling free-form documents, often overlooking structured data such as lists, which can represent a…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) topic has seen a lot of progress these last three years, with the emergence of end-to-end neural approaches. Spoken language understanding refers to natural language processing tasks related to semantic…

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.,…

Follow-up conversations with virtual assistants (VAs) enable a user to seamlessly interact with a VA without the need to repeatedly invoke it using a keyword (after the first query). Therefore, accurate Device-directed Speech Detection…

Punctuation prediction for automatic speech recognition (ASR) output transcripts plays a crucial role for improving the readability of the ASR transcripts and for improving the performance of downstream natural language processing…

Question Answering (QA) is key for making possible a robust communication between human and machine. Modern language models used for QA have surpassed the human-performance in several essential tasks; however, these models require large…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is indispensable for half of all living languages that lack a formal writing system. Unlike for high-resource languages, for these languages, we cannot offload semantic understanding of speech to the…

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…

In this paper, we present a neural spoken language diarization model that supports an unconstrained span of languages within a single framework. Our approach integrates a learnable query-based architecture grounded in multilingual…

This paper tackles automatically discovering phone-like acoustic units (AUD) from unlabeled speech data. Past studies usually proposed single-step approaches. We propose a two-stage approach: the first stage learns a subword-discriminative…

Spoken Language Understanding infers semantic meaning directly from audio data, and thus promises to reduce error propagation and misunderstandings in end-user applications. However, publicly available SLU resources are limited. In this…

Spoken language understanding, which extracts intents and/or semantic concepts in utterances, is conventionally formulated as a post-processing of automatic speech recognition. It is usually trained with oracle transcripts, but needs to…

We propose a novel deliberation-based approach to end-to-end (E2E) spoken language understanding (SLU), where a streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) model produces the first-pass hypothesis and a second-pass natural language…