Related papers: SQuId: Measuring Speech Naturalness in Many Langua…
Speech Language Models (SLMs) have made significant progress in spoken language understanding. Yet it remains unclear whether they can fully perceive non lexical vocal cues alongside spoken words, and respond with empathy that aligns with…
Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in many natural language processing pipelines. However, current LID systems are far from perfect, particularly on lower-resource languages. We present a LID model which achieves a…
Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) as judges have emerged as a prominent approach for evaluating speech generation quality, yet their ability to assess speaker consistency across multi-turn dialogues remains unexplored. We present…
Nowadays, training end-to-end neural models for spoken language translation (SLT) still has to confront with extreme data scarcity conditions. The existing SLT parallel corpora are indeed orders of magnitude smaller than those available for…
The diversity of human language, shaped by social, cultural, and regional influences, presents significant challenges for natural language processing (NLP) systems. Existing benchmarks often overlook intra-language variations, leaving…
When evaluating the performance of automatic speech recognition models, usually word error rate within a certain dataset is used. Special care must be taken in understanding the dataset in order to report realistic performance numbers. We…
Automatic speech quality assessment is essential for audio researchers, developers, speech and language pathologists, and system quality engineers. The current state-of-the-art systems are based on framewise speech features (hand-engineered…
While natural language processing systems often focus on a single language, multilingual transfer learning has the potential to improve performance, especially for low-resource languages. We introduce XLDA, cross-lingual data augmentation,…
Multilinguality is a core capability for modern foundation models, yet training high-quality multilingual models remains challenging due to uneven data availability across languages. A further challenge is the performance interference that…
We introduce SHEET, a multi-purpose open-source toolkit designed to accelerate subjective speech quality assessment (SSQA) research. SHEET stands for the Speech Human Evaluation Estimation Toolkit, which focuses on data-driven deep neural…
Scaling existing applications and solutions to multiple human languages has traditionally proven to be difficult, mainly due to the language-dependent nature of preprocessing and feature engineering techniques employed in traditional…
We introduce an approach to multilingual speech synthesis which uses the meta-learning concept of contextual parameter generation and produces natural-sounding multilingual speech using more languages and less training data than previous…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in multilingual contexts, yet their capacity for consistent, logically grounded alignment across languages remains underexplored. We present a controlled evaluation framework for…
The field of prosody transfer in speech synthesis systems is rapidly advancing. This research is focused on evaluating learning methods for adapting pre-trained monolingual text-to-speech (TTS) models to multilingual conditions, i.e.,…
Building reliable speech systems often requires combining multiple modalities, like audio and visual cues. While such multimodal solutions frequently lead to improvements in performance and may even be critical in certain cases, they come…
The potential of synthetic data in text-to-speech (TTS) model training has gained increasing attention, yet its rationality and effectiveness require systematic validation. In this study, we systematically investigate the feasibility of…
Question answering (QA) systems are now available through numerous commercial applications for a wide variety of domains, serving millions of users that interact with them via speech interfaces. However, current benchmarks in QA research do…
Sentence Boundary Detection (SBD) is one of the foundational building blocks of Natural Language Processing (NLP), with incorrectly split sentences heavily influencing the output quality of downstream tasks. It is a challenging task for…
While the English virtual assistants have achieved exciting performance with an enormous amount of training resources, the needs of non-English-speakers have not been satisfied well. Up to Dec 2021, Alexa, one of the most popular smart…
Despite multilingual pretraining, large language models often struggle with non-English tasks, particularly in language control, the ability to respond in the intended language. We identify and characterize two key failure modes: the…