Related papers: Leveraging Phone Mask Training for Phonetic-Reduct…

Accurate speech emotion recognition is essential for developing human-facing systems. Recent advancements have included finetuning large, pretrained transformer models like Wav2Vec 2.0. However, the finetuning process requires substantial…

Monaural speech enhancement has been widely studied using real networks in the time-frequency (TF) domain. However, the input and the target are naturally complex-valued in the TF domain, a fully complex network is highly desirable for…

End-to-end transformer-based models epitomize the cutting-edge in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Despite their substantial benefits, these models demand extensive training data to perform optimally, presenting a significant…

Despite significant advances in recent years, the existing Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) methods detect pronunciation errors with a relatively low accuracy (precision of 60% at 40%-80% recall). This Ph.D. work proposes…

Deepfake speech detection presents a growing challenge as generative audio technologies continue to advance. We propose a hybrid training framework that advances detection performance through novel augmentation strategies. First, we…

We propose a first step toward multilingual end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) by integrating knowledge about speech articulators. The key idea is to leverage a rich set of fundamental units that can be defined "universally"…

The external language models (LM) integration remains a challenging task for end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) which has no clear division between acoustic and language models. In this work, we propose an internal LM…

Speech enhancement remains challenging due to the trade-off between efficiency and perceptual quality. In this paper, we introduce MAGE, a Masked Audio Generative Enhancer that advances generative speech enhancement through a compact and…

In recent years, the rapid progress in speaker verification (SV) technology has been driven by the extraction of speaker representations based on deep learning. However, such representations are still vulnerable to emotion variability. To…

An on-device DNN-HMM speech recognition system efficiently works with a limited vocabulary in the presence of a variety of predictable noise. In such a case, vocabulary and environment adaptation is highly effective. In this paper, we…

Whisper and other large-scale automatic speech recognition models have made significant progress in performance. However, their performance on many low-resource languages, such as Kazakh, is not satisfactory. It is worth researching how to…

End-to-end (E2E) spoken language understanding (SLU) can infer semantics directly from speech signal without cascading an automatic speech recognizer (ASR) with a natural language understanding (NLU) module. However, paired utterance…

Using neural network based acoustic frontends for improving robustness of streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is challenging because of the causality constraints and the resulting distortion that the frontend processing…

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) and feedback play a vital role in supporting second language (L2) learners, educators, and examiners. While written GEC is well-established, spoken GEC (SGEC), aiming to provide feedback based on learners'…

Masked language modeling has become a standard pretraining objective for training encoder-based language models. In this approach, certain tokens in the input are masked, and the model learns to predict them using the surrounding context.…

Attention mechanisms that confer selective focus on a strict subset of input elements are nearly ubiquitous in language models today. We posit there to be downside to the use of attention: most input information is lost. In support of this…

The Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) task aims to convert orthographic input into a discrete phonetic representation. G2P conversion is beneficial to various speech processing applications, such as text-to-speech and speech recognition. However,…

Voice Assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant typically use a two-stage Spoken Language Understanding pipeline; first, an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) component to process customer speech and generate text transcriptions,…

End-to-end (E2E) systems are fast replacing the conventional systems in the domain of automatic speech recognition. As the target labels are learned directly from speech data, the E2E systems need a bigger corpus for effective training. In…

End-to-end (E2E) models are often being accompanied by language models (LMs) via shallow fusion for boosting their overall quality as well as recognition of rare words. At the same time, several prior works show that LMs are susceptible to…