Related papers: ArTST: Arabic Text and Speech Transformer

Conventional spoken language translation (SLT) systems are pipeline based systems, where we have an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system to convert the modality of source from speech to text and a Machine Translation (MT) systems to…

Although many Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have been developed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA), few studies have focused on dialect-specific implementations, particularly for low-resource Arabic…

Transfer learning from high-resource languages is known to be an efficient way to improve end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages. Pre-trained or jointly trained encoder-decoder models, however, do not share…

The use of multilingual language models for tasks in low and high-resource languages has been a success story in deep learning. In recent times, Arabic has been receiving widespread attention on account of its dialectal variance. While…

Accent Conversion (AC) seeks to change the accent of speech from one (source) to another (target) while preserving the speech content and speaker identity. However, many AC approaches rely on source-target parallel speech data. We propose a…

Neural transducers (NT) provide an effective framework for speech streaming, demonstrating strong performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the application of NT to speech translation (ST) remains challenging, as existing…

Neural machine translation models have shown to achieve high quality when trained and fed with well structured and punctuated input texts. Unfortunately, the latter condition is not met in spoken language translation, where the input is…

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) aims to convert speech from one language into another, and has demonstrated significant progress to date. Despite the recent success, current S2ST models still suffer from distinct degradation in…

Language-specific pre-trained models have proven to be more accurate than multilingual ones in a monolingual evaluation setting, Arabic is no exception. However, we found that previously released Arabic BERT models were significantly…

Building Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for code-switched speech has recently gained renewed attention due to the widespread use of speech technologies in multilingual communities worldwide. End-to-end ASR systems are a natural…

In the development of neural text-to-speech systems, model pre-training with a large amount of non-target speakers' data is a common approach. However, in terms of ultimately achieved system performance for target speaker(s), the actual…

Advances in English language representation enabled a more sample-efficient pre-training task by Efficiently Learning an Encoder that Classifies Token Replacements Accurately (ELECTRA). Which, instead of training a model to recover masked…

ChatGPT is a language model based on Generative AI. Existing research work on ChatGPT focused on its use in various domains. However, its potential for Sign Language Translation (SLT) is yet to be explored. This paper addresses this void.…

Arabic is a complex language with many varieties and dialects spoken by over 450 millions all around the world. Due to the linguistic diversity and variations, it is challenging to build a robust and generalized ASR system for Arabic. In…

We present an analysis of diacritic recognition performance in Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. As most existing Arabic speech corpora do not contain all diacritical marks, which represent short vowels and other phonetic…

The rapid development of single-modal pre-training has prompted researchers to pay more attention to cross-modal pre-training methods. In this paper, we propose a unified-modal speech-unit-text pre-training model, SpeechUT, to connect the…

We present a joint Speech and Language Model (SLM), a multitask, multilingual, and dual-modal model that takes advantage of pretrained foundational speech and language models. SLM freezes the pretrained foundation models to maximally…

Large self-supervised speech (SSL) models achieve strong downstream performance, but their size limits deployment in resource-constrained settings. We present HArnESS, an Arabic-centric self-supervised speech model family trained from…

Encoder-only transformer models remain widely used for discriminative NLP tasks, yet recent architectural advances have largely focused on English. In this work, we present AraModernBERT, an adaptation of the ModernBERT encoder architecture…

We present a novel approach to end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) that utilizes pre-trained masked language models (LMs) to facilitate the extraction of linguistic information. The proposed models, BERT-CTC and BECTRA, are…