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Many mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MD&D) research approaches try to exploit both the acoustic and linguistic features as input. Yet the improvement of the performance is limited, partially due to the shortage of large amount…
Acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) are vector representations of spoken word segments. AWEs can be learned jointly with embeddings of character sequences, to generate phonetically meaningful embeddings of written words, or acoustically…
State of the art speech recognition systems use data-intensive context-dependent phonemes as acoustic units. However, these approaches do not translate well to low resourced languages where large amounts of training data is not available.…
Despite recent advancements in deep learning technologies, Child Speech Recognition remains a challenging task. Current Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models require substantial amounts of annotated data for training, which is scarce.…
The accuracy of modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems, when trained exclusively on adult data, drops substantially when applied to children's speech. The scarcity of children's speech corpora hinders fine-tuning ASV systems…
To address the performance gap of English ASR models on L2 English speakers, we evaluate fine-tuning of pretrained wav2vec 2.0 models (Baevski et al., 2020; Xu et al., 2021) on L2-ARCTIC, a non-native English speech corpus (Zhao et al.,…
This paper describes technology developed to automatically grade Italian students (ages 9-16) on their English and German spoken language proficiency. The students' spoken answers are first transcribed by an automatic speech recognition…
Unsupervised and self-supervised learning methods have leveraged unlabelled data to improve the pretrained models. However, these methods need significantly large amount of unlabelled data and the computational cost of training models with…
Automated speech recognition coverage of the world's languages continues to expand. However, standard phoneme based systems require handcrafted lexicons that are difficult and expensive to obtain. To address this problem, we propose a…
This work deals with non-native children's speech and investigates both multi-task and transfer learning approaches to adapt a multi-language Deep Neural Network (DNN) to speakers, specifically children, learning a foreign language. The…
Preschool evaluation is crucial because it gives teachers and parents influential knowledge about children's growth and development. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the necessity of online assessment for preschool children. One of the…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems often struggle with transcribing child speech due to the lack of large child speech datasets required to accurately train child-friendly ASR models. However, there are huge amounts of annotated…
This study presents a model of automatic speech recognition (ASR) designed to diagnose pronunciation issues in children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) to replace manual transcriptions in clinical procedures. Since ASR models trained for…
In the traditional cascading architecture for spoken language understanding (SLU), it has been observed that automatic speech recognition errors could be detrimental to the performance of natural language understanding. End-to-end (E2E) SLU…
Children speech recognition is challenging mainly due to the inherent high variability in children's physical and articulatory characteristics and expressions. This variability manifests in both acoustic constructs and linguistic usage due…
End-to-end acoustic-to-word speech recognition models have recently gained popularity because they are easy to train, scale well to large amounts of training data, and do not require a lexicon. In addition, word models may also be easier to…
Bootstrapping speech recognition on limited data resources has been an area of active research for long. The recent transition to all-neural models and end-to-end (E2E) training brought along particular challenges as these models are known…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly used in applications involving child speech, such as language learning and literacy acquisition. However, the effectiveness of such applications is limited by high ASR error rates. The…
Assessment of children's speaking fluency in education is well researched for majority languages, but remains highly challenging for low resource languages. This paper proposes a system to automatically assess fluency by combining a…
This study addresses unsupervised subword modeling, i.e., learning acoustic feature representations that can distinguish between subword units of a language. We propose a two-stage learning framework that combines self-supervised learning…