Related papers: Beyond acoustics -- capacity limitations of lingui…
Emotions play a central role in human communication, shaping trust, engagement, and social interaction. As artificial intelligence systems powered by large language models become increasingly integrated into everyday life, enabling them to…
This paper describes a framework and a method with which speech communication can be analyzed. The framework consists of a set of low bit rate, short-range acoustic communication systems, such as speech, but that are quite different from…
Human communication involves more than explicit semantics, with implicit signals and contextual cues playing a critical role in shaping meaning. However, modern speech technologies, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and…
People convey information extremely effectively through spoken interaction using multiple channels of information transmission: the lexical channel of what is said, and the non-lexical channel of how it is said. We propose studying human…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
The evaluation of synthetic and processed speech has long been a cornerstone of audio engineering and speech science. Although subjective listening tests remain the gold standard for assessing perceptual quality and intelligibility, their…
Multichannel speech enhancement algorithms are essential for improving the intelligibility of speech signals in noisy environments. These algorithms are usually evaluated at the utterance level, but this approach overlooks the disparities…
This study examines the relationship between speech representations and the hierarchical structure of cognitive assessment in mild cognitive impairment. Utilizing 5,754 German neuropsychological assessment recordings, we evaluate six…
Speech emotion recognition (SER) is vital for obtaining emotional intelligence and understanding the contextual meaning of speech. Variations of consonant-vowel (CV) phonemic boundaries can enrich acoustic context with linguistic cues,…
Language exhibits structure at different scales, ranging from subwords to words, sentences, paragraphs, and documents. To what extent do deep models capture information at these scales, and can we force them to better capture structure…
This paper provides a computational analysis of poetry reading audio signals at a large scale to unveil the musicality within professionally-read poems. Although the acoustic characteristics of other types of spoken language have been…
Despite rapid advancement in recent years, current speech enhancement models often produce speech that differs in perceptual quality from real clean speech. We propose a learning objective that formalizes differences in perceptual quality,…
Multi-channel acoustic signal processing is a well-established and powerful tool to exploit the spatial diversity between a target signal and non-target or noise sources for signal enhancement. However, the textbook solutions for optimal…
Speaker identity plays a significant role in human communication and is being increasingly used in societal applications, many through advances in machine learning. Speaker identity perception is an essential cognitive phenomenon that can…
It is widely accepted that information derived from analyzing speech (the acoustic signal) and language production (words and sentences) serves as a useful window into the health of an individual's cognitive ability. In fact, most…
In the domain of unsupervised learning most work on speech has focused on discovering low-level constructs such as phoneme inventories or word-like units. In contrast, for written language, where there is a large body of work on…
Acoustic communication is indispensable for underwater networks, deep ocean exploration, and biological monitoring, environments where electromagnetic waves become impractical. However, unlike the latter, whose vector polarization naturally…
Speech is a fundamental means of communication that can be seen to provide two channels for transmitting information: the lexical channel of which words are said, and the non-lexical channel of how they are spoken. Both channels shape…
Voice assistants (VAs) are typically evaluated through task performance metrics and self-report questionnaires, but people's voices themselves carry rich paralinguistic cues that reveal affect, effort, and interaction breakdowns. We present…
Despite being trained exclusively on speech data, speech foundation models (SFMs) like Whisper have shown impressive performance in non-speech tasks such as audio classification. This is partly because speech shares some common traits with…