Related papers: End-to-End Word-Level Pronunciation Assessment wit…

The relationship between written and spoken words is convoluted in languages with a deep orthography such as English and therefore it is difficult to devise explicit rules for generating the pronunciations for unseen words. Pronunciation by…

Self-supervised language and audio models effectively predict brain responses to speech. However, traditional prediction models rely on linear mappings from unimodal features, despite the complex integration of auditory signals with…

Recently, end-to-end (E2E) models, which allow to take spectral vector sequences of L2 (second-language) learners' utterances as input and produce the corresponding phone-level sequences as output, have attracted much research attention in…

In the recent trend of semi-supervised speech recognition, both self-supervised representation learning and pseudo-labeling have shown promising results. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to combine their ideas for end-to-end…

Recently, pre-trained models with phonetic supervision have demonstrated their advantages for crosslingual speech recognition in data efficiency and information sharing across languages. However, a limitation is that a pronunciation lexicon…

We propose a first step toward multilingual end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) by integrating knowledge about speech articulators. The key idea is to leverage a rich set of fundamental units that can be defined "universally"…

Automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) manages to evaluate the pronunciation proficiency of a second language (L2) learner in a target language. Existing efforts typically draw on regression models for proficiency score prediction, where…

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance for various language understanding tasks in IR systems, which require the fine-tuning process based on labeled training data. For low-resource scenarios, prompt-based…

Mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) technology is a key component of computer-assisted pronunciation training system (CAPT). In the field of assessing the pronunciation quality of constrained speech, the given transcriptions can…

We introduce EmphAssess, a prosodic benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of speech-to-speech models to encode and reproduce prosodic emphasis. We apply this to two tasks: speech resynthesis and speech-to-speech translation. In both…

End-to-end Speech-to-text Translation (E2E-ST), which directly translates source language speech to target language text, is widely useful in practice, but traditional cascaded approaches (ASR+MT) often suffer from error propagation in the…

Learners of a second language (L2) often map non-native phonemes to similar native-language (L1) phonemes, making conventional L2-focused training slow and effortful. To address this, we propose an L1-grounded pronunciation training method…

Referring image segmentation aims at localizing all pixels of the visual objects described by a natural language sentence. Previous works learn to straightforwardly align the sentence embedding and pixel-level embedding for highlighting the…

Subtle hand differences make sign language recognition challenging, yet many existing methods rely on encoders pretrained on generic action datasets that poorly capture such fine-grained cues. We propose a self-supervised pretraining method…

This report proposes state-of-the-art research in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Mispronunciation detection is one of the core components of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems which is a subset…

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with cross-lingual tasks due to data imbalances between high-resource and low-resource languages, as well as monolingual bias in pre-training. Existing methods, such as bilingual…

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) for downstream tasks is a large-scale optimization problem, in which the choice of the training algorithm critically determines how well the trained model can generalize to unseen test data,…

We present an efficient method of utilizing pretrained language models, where we learn selective binary masks for pretrained weights in lieu of modifying them through finetuning. Extensive evaluations of masking BERT and RoBERTa on a series…

The state-of-the-art pre-trained language representation models, such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), rarely incorporate commonsense knowledge or other knowledge explicitly. We propose a pre-training…

In reasoning tasks, even a minor error can cascade into inaccurate results, leading to suboptimal performance of large language models in such domains. Earlier fine-tuning approaches sought to mitigate this by leveraging more precise…