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In a modern spoken language understanding (SLU) system, the natural language understanding (NLU) module takes interpretations of a speech from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) module as the input. The NLU module usually uses the first…

This paper summarizes our contributions to the document-grounded dialog tasks at the 9th and 10th Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC9 and DSTC10). In both iterations the task consists of three subtasks: first detect whether the…

Human language is a combination of elemental languages/domains/styles that change across and sometimes within discourses. Language models, which play a crucial role in speech recognizers and machine translation systems, are particularly…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often make unrecoverable errors due to subsystem pruning (acoustic, language and pronunciation models); for example pruning words due to acoustics using short-term context, prior to rescoring with…

The rapid development of neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems enabled its usage in other areas of natural language processing such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) or spoken language translation (SLT). Due to the large number of…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a fundamental task in the task-oriented dialogue systems. However, the inevitable errors from automatic speech recognition (ASR) usually impair the understanding performance and lead to error…

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…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a task that aims to extract semantic information from spoken utterances. Previous research has made progress in end-to-end SLU by using paired speech-text data, such as pre-trained Automatic Speech…

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 presents a method to train end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models using unpaired data. Although the end-to-end approach can eliminate the need for expert knowledge such as pronunciation dictionaries to build ASR…

Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) led to the development of flexible multi-speaker end-to-end TTS systems. We extend state-of-the-art attention-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems with synthetic audio generated by a TTS…

We recently developed SLM, a joint speech and language model, which fuses a pretrained foundational speech model and a large language model (LLM), while preserving the in-context learning capability intrinsic to the pretrained LLM. In this…

Text to speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) are two dual tasks in speech processing and both achieve impressive performance thanks to the recent advance in deep learning and large amount of aligned speech and text data.…

Collecting sufficient labeled data for spoken language understanding (SLU) is expensive and time-consuming. Recent studies achieved promising results by using pre-trained models in low-resource scenarios. Inspired by this, we aim to ask:…

Stuttering is a speech disorder where the natural flow of speech is interrupted by blocks, repetitions or prolongations of syllables, words and phrases. The majority of existing automatic speech recognition (ASR) interfaces perform poorly…

Spoken Question Answering (SQA) is to find the answer from a spoken document given a question, which is crucial for personal assistants when replying to the queries from the users. Existing SQA methods all rely on Automatic Speech…

This paper presents a hybrid dialog state tracker enhanced by trainable Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) for slot-filling dialog systems. Our architecture is inspired by previously proposed neural-network-based belief-tracking systems.…

Off-the-shelf pre-trained Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are an increasingly viable service for companies of any size building speech-based products. While these ASR systems are trained on large amounts of data, domain mismatch…

Current speech-based LLMs are predominantly trained on extensive ASR and TTS datasets, excelling in tasks related to these domains. However, their ability to handle direct speech-to-speech conversations remains notably constrained. These…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is the problem of extracting the meaning from speech utterances. It is typically addressed as a two-step problem, where an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model is employed to convert speech into text,…