Related papers: AfriNames: Most ASR models "butcher" African Names

In recent years, end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have proven themselves remarkably accurate and performant, but these systems still have a significant error rate for entity names which appear infrequently in their…

In recent years, neural models trained on large multilingual text and speech datasets have shown great potential for supporting low-resource languages. This study investigates the performances of two state-of-the-art Automatic Speech…

Edge-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies are increasingly prevalent in the development of intelligent and personalized assistants. However, resource-constrained ASR models face significant challenges in adaptivity,…

Personalization of automatic speech recognition (ASR) models is a widely studied topic because of its many practical applications. Most recently, attention-based contextual biasing techniques are used to improve the recognition of rare…

Existing research suggests that automatic speech recognition (ASR) models can benefit from additional contexts (e.g., contact lists, user specified vocabulary). Rare words and named entities can be better recognized with contexts. In this…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have been shown to have large quality disparities between the language varieties they are intended or expected to recognize. One way to mitigate this is to train or fine-tune models with more…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems become increasingly efficient thanks to new advances in neural network training like self-supervised learning. However, they are known to be unfair toward certain groups, for instance, people…

Although Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have achieved human-like performance for a few languages, the majority of the world's languages do not have usable systems due to the lack of large speech datasets to train these models.…

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but are underrepresented in NLP research and development. The challenges impeding progress include the limited availability of annotated datasets, as well as a lack of understanding of…

End-to-end models for robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) have not been sufficiently well-explored in prior work. With end-to-end models, one could choose to preprocess the input speech using speech enhancement techniques and train…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems generalize poorly on accented speech. The phonetic and linguistic variability of accents present hard challenges for ASR systems today in both data collection and modeling strategies. The resulting…

We present a novel Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset for the Oromo language, a widely spoken language in Ethiopia and neighboring regions. The dataset was collected through a crowd-sourcing initiative, encompassing a diverse range…

We consider the problem of recognizing speech utterances spoken to a device which is generating a known sound waveform; for example, recognizing queries issued to a digital assistant which is generating responses to previous user inputs.…

Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly enhanced multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) due to the development of advanced model architectures and available large-scale multilingual datasets. Despite that,…

Word Error Rate (WER) mischaracterizes ASR models' performance for African languages by combining phonological, tone, and other linguistic errors into a single lexical error. By contrast, Feature Error Rate (FER) has recently attracted…

This paper describes the results of an informal collaboration launched during the African Master of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) in June 2020. After a series of lectures and labs on speech data collection using mobile applications and on…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) models trained on large amounts of audio data are now widely used to convert speech to written text in a variety of applications from video captioning to automated assistants used in healthcare and other…

We study training a single acoustic model for multiple languages with the aim of improving automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance on low-resource languages, and over-all simplifying deployment of ASR systems that support diverse…

Speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR) aims to transcribe speech while assigning transcripts to the corresponding speakers accurately. Existing methods often rely on complex modular systems or require extensive fine-tuning…

Indigenous languages are a fundamental legacy in the development of human communication, embodying the unique identity and culture of local communities in America. The Second AmericasNLP (Americas Natural Language Processing) Competition…