Related papers: ASR-Generated Text for Language Model Pre-training…

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems achieve strong performance with limited resources by linking a frozen speech encoder to a pretrained LLM via a lightweight connector. Prior work trains a separate…

Recent work on speech representation models jointly pre-trained with text has demonstrated the potential of improving speech representations by encoding speech and text in a shared space. In this paper, we leverage such shared…

We present a novel approach to end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) that utilizes pre-trained masked language models (LMs) to facilitate the extraction of linguistic information. The proposed models, BERT-CTC and BECTRA, are…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently garnered significant attention, primarily for their capabilities in text-based interactions. However, natural human interaction often relies on speech, necessitating a shift towards voice-based…

Despite recent progress in multilingual speech processing, African languages remain under-represented in both research and deployed systems, particularly when it comes to strong, open-weight encoders that transfer well under low-resource…

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in NLP and have recently been used for tasks in computational semantics. However, these tasks do not fully benefit from PLMs since meaning representations are not explicitly…

Much recent work on Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is limited in at least one of three ways: models were trained on oracle text input and neglected ASR errors, models were trained to predict only intents without the slot values, or…

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) uses lip-based video to improve performance in noise. Since videos are harder to obtain than audio, the video training data of AVSR models is usually limited to a few thousand hours. In contrast,…

Transfer learning from high-resource languages is known to be an efficient way to improve end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages. Pre-trained or jointly trained encoder-decoder models, however, do not share…

In this paper we examine the use of semantically-aligned speech representations for end-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU). We employ the recently-introduced SAMU-XLSR model, which is designed to generate a single embedding that…

One common approach for question answering over speech data is to first transcribe speech using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and then employ text-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on the transcriptions. While this cascaded…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have achieved remarkable performance on widely used benchmarks such as LibriSpeech and Fleurs. However, these benchmarks do not adequately reflect the complexities of real-world conversational…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) models rely on high-quality transcribed data for effective training. Generating pseudo-labels for large unlabeled audio datasets often relies on complex pipelines that combine multiple ASR outputs through…

Training deep neural networks for automatic speech recognition (ASR) requires large amounts of transcribed speech. This becomes a bottleneck for training robust models for accented speech which typically contains high variability in…

Large Pre-Trained Language Models have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in different downstream tasks, including dialogue state tracking and end-to-end response generation. Nevertheless, most of the publicly available datasets and…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is traditionally evaluated using Word Error Rate (WER), a metric that is insensitive to meaning. Embedding-based semantic metrics are better correlated with human perception, but decoder-based Large…

Large, pre-trained transformer-based language models such as BERT have drastically changed the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. We present a survey of recent work that uses these large language models to solve NLP tasks via…

Despite recent advancements in speech processing, zero-resource speech translation (ST) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) remain challenging problems. In this work, we propose to leverage a multilingual Large Language Model (LLM) to…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks are usually solved by first transcribing an utterance with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and then feeding the output to a text-based model. Recent advances in self-supervised representation…

This paper summarizes our submission to Task 2 of the second track of the 10th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC10) "Knowledge-grounded Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations". Similar to the previous year's…