Related papers: Automatic Pronunciation Assessment -- A Review

CAPTCHAs are widely used by websites to block bots and spam by presenting challenges that are easy for humans but difficult for automated programs to solve. To improve accessibility, audio CAPTCHAs are designed to complement visual ones.…

Prosodic boundary plays an important role in text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) in terms of naturalness and readability. However, the acquisition of prosodic boundary labels relies on manual annotation, which is costly and time-consuming. In…

English proficiency assessments have become a necessary metric for filtering and selecting prospective candidates for both academia and industry. With the rise in demand for such assessments, it has become increasingly necessary to have the…

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by solving a wide range of tasks simply guided by a prompt. Yet their performance is highly sensitive to prompt formulation. While automatic prompt optimization…

Sentence level pronunciation assessment is important for Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Traditional speech pronunciation assessment, based on the Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP) algorithm, has some weakness in assessing a…

Language identification from speech is a common preprocessing step in many spoken language processing systems. In recent years, this field has seen fast progress, mostly due to the use of self-supervised models pretrained on multilingual…

Advancements in AI-driven speech-based applications have transformed diverse industries ranging from healthcare to customer service. However, the increasing prevalence of non-native accented speech in global interactions poses significant…

Expressive reading, considered the defining attribute of oral reading fluency, comprises the prosodic realization of phrasing and prominence. In the context of evaluating oral reading, it helps to establish the speaker's comprehension of…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) helps empower intelligent machines by enhancing a better understanding of the human language for linguistic-based human-computer communication. Recent developments in computational power and the advent of…

Because lab accuracy of clinical speech technology systems may be overoptimistic, clinical validation is vital to demonstrate system reproducibility - in this case, the ability of the PERCEPT-R Classifier to predict clinician judgment of…

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…

Masked language models have revolutionized natural language processing systems in the past few years. A recently introduced generalization of masked language models called warped language models are trained to be more robust to the types of…

Automatic translation from signed to spoken languages is an interdisciplinary research domain, lying on the intersection of computer vision, machine translation and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this domain is performed mostly by…

Automatic dialogue evaluation plays a crucial role in open-domain dialogue research. Previous works train neural networks with limited annotation for conducting automatic dialogue evaluation, which would naturally affect the evaluation…

Automatic speech recognition systems are part of people's daily lives, embedded in personal assistants and mobile phones, helping as a facilitator for human-machine interaction while allowing access to information in a practically intuitive…

The prominence of a spoken word is the degree to which an average native listener perceives the word as salient or emphasized relative to its context. Speech prominence estimation is the process of assigning a numeric value to the…

There has been a growing demand for automated spoken language assessment systems in recent years. A standard pipeline for this process is to start with a speech recognition system and derive features, either hand-crafted or based on…

In speech processing pipelines, improving the quality and intelligibility of real-world recordings is crucial. While supervised regression is the primary method for speech enhancement, audio tokenization is emerging as a promising…

We present ProsAudit, a benchmark in English to assess structural prosodic knowledge in self-supervised learning (SSL) speech models. It consists of two subtasks, their corresponding metrics, and an evaluation dataset. In the protosyntax…

Since the advent of large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering has been a crucial step for eliciting desired responses for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, prompt engineering remains an impediment for end…