Related papers: Africa-Centric Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Mu…

Speech technology remains out of reach for most of the over 2300 languages in Africa. We present the first systematic assessment of large-scale synthetic voice corpora for African ASR. We apply a three-step process: LLM-driven text…

AfriSenti-SemEval Shared Task 12 of SemEval-2023. The task aims to perform monolingual sentiment classification (sub-task A) for 12 African languages, multilingual sentiment classification (sub-task B), and zero-shot sentiment…

We present Ara-BEST-RQ, a family of self-supervised learning (SSL) models specifically designed for multi-dialectal Arabic speech processing. Leveraging 5,640 hours of crawled Creative Commons speech and combining it with publicly available…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is indispensable for half of all living languages that lack a formal writing system. Unlike for high-resource languages, for these languages, we cannot offload semantic understanding of speech to the…

Self-supervised learning has been used to leverage unlabelled data, improving accuracy and generalisation of speech systems through the training of representation models. While many recent works have sought to produce effective…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a long-standing goal for speech processing, since it utilizes large-scale unlabeled data and avoids extensive human labeling. Recent years witness great successes in applying self-supervised learning in…

We present the findings of SemEval-2023 Task 12, a shared task on sentiment analysis for low-resource African languages using Twitter dataset. The task featured three subtasks; subtask A is monolingual sentiment classification with 12…

Large-scale training corpora have significantly improved the performance of ASR models. Unfortunately, due to the relative scarcity of data, Chinese accents and dialects remain a challenge for most ASR models. Recent advancements in…

The utilization of speech Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models achieves impressive performance on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, in low-resource language ASR, they encounter the domain mismatch problem between pre-trained and…

Training a conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to support multiple languages is challenging because the sub-word unit, lexicon and word inventories are typically language specific. In contrast, sequence-to-sequence models…

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…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) plays a vital role in enabling natural human-machine interaction across applications such as virtual assistants, industrial automation, customer support, and real-time transcription. However, developing…

ML-SUPERB evaluates self-supervised learning (SSL) models on the tasks of language identification and automatic speech recognition (ASR). This benchmark treats the models as feature extractors and uses a single shallow downstream model,…

In recent years, sentiment analysis has gained significant importance in natural language processing. However, most existing models and datasets for sentiment analysis are developed for high-resource languages, such as English and Chinese,…

Acoustic word embedding models map variable duration speech segments to fixed dimensional vectors, enabling efficient speech search and discovery. Previous work explored how embeddings can be obtained in zero-resource settings where no…

This paper describes the systems developed by SPRING Lab, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, for the ASRU MADASR 2.0 challenge. The systems developed focuses on adapting ASR systems to improve in predicting the language and dialect of…

With 4.5 million hours of English speech from 10 different sources across 120 countries and models of up to 10 billion parameters, we explore the frontiers of scale for automatic speech recognition. We propose data selection techniques to…

We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of…

End-to-end models have achieved impressive results on the task of automatic speech recognition (ASR). For low-resource ASR tasks, however, labeled data can hardly satisfy the demand of end-to-end models. Self-supervised acoustic…

This paper shows that pretraining multilingual language models at scale leads to significant performance gains for a wide range of cross-lingual transfer tasks. We train a Transformer-based masked language model on one hundred languages,…