Related papers: Reading Miscue Detection in Primary School through…

Automatic reading aloud evaluation can provide valuable support to teachers by enabling more efficient scoring of reading exercises. However, research on reading evaluation systems and applications remains limited. We present a novel…

Despite recent advancements in deep learning technologies, Child Speech Recognition remains a challenging task. Current Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models require substantial amounts of annotated data for training, which is scarce.…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has the potential to substantially reduce manual annotation effort in child speech research by generating automatic transcriptions. However, obtaining reliably high-quality ASR transcriptions for child…

Recent advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, exemplified by Whisper, have demonstrated the potential of these systems to approach human-level performance given sufficient data. However, this progress doesn't readily…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly used in applications involving child speech, such as language learning and literacy acquisition. However, the effectiveness of such applications is limited by high ASR error rates. The…

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…

Automatic assessment of reading fluency using automatic speech recognition (ASR) holds great potential for early detection of reading difficulties and subsequent timely intervention. Precise assessment tools are required, especially for…

Voicebots have provided a new avenue for supporting the development of language skills, particularly within the context of second language learning. Voicebots, though, have largely been geared towards native adult speakers. We sought to…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems often struggle with transcribing child speech due to the lack of large child speech datasets required to accurately train child-friendly ASR models. However, there are huge amounts of annotated…

Identifying mistakes (i.e., miscues) made while reading aloud is commonly approached post-hoc by comparing automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions to the target reading text. However, post-hoc methods perform poorly when ASR…

We introduce Whisper-RIR-Mega, a benchmark dataset of paired clean and reverberant speech for evaluating automatic speech recognition (ASR) robustness to room acoustics. Each sample pairs a clean LibriSpeech utterance with the same…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have progressed significantly in their performance on adult speech data; however, transcribing child speech remains challenging due to the acoustic differences in the characteristics of child and…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been an essential component of computer assisted language learning (CALL) and computer assisted language testing (CALT) for many years. As this technology continues to develop rapidly, it is important…

The interest in employing automatic speech recognition (ASR) in applications for reading practice has been growing in recent years. In a previous study, we presented an ASR-based Dutch reading tutor application that was developed to provide…

Reliable transcription of child-adult conversations in clinical settings is crucial for diagnosing developmental disorders like Autism. Recent advances in deep learning and availability of large scale transcribed data has led to development…

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…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are known to exhibit difficulties when transcribing children's speech. This can mainly be attributed to the absence of large children's speech corpora to train robust ASR models and the resulting…

Speech self-supervised models such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT are making revolutionary progress in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, they have not been totally proven to produce better performance on tasks other than ASR. In this…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages remains constrained by limited labeled data and the lack of systematic guidance on model selection, data scaling, and decoding strategies. Large pre-trained systems such as Whisper,…

In this work, we present the first study addressing automatic speech recognition (ASR) for children in an online learning setting. This is particularly important for both child-centric applications and the privacy protection of minors,…