Related papers: AfriHuBERT: A self-supervised speech representatio…

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…

Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to recognize and transcribe speech from multiple languages within a single system. Whisper, one of the most advanced ASR models, excels in this domain by handling 99 languages…

Automatic speech recognition for low-resource languages remains fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of labeled data and computational resources required by state-of-the-art models. We present a systematic investigation into…

Language Identification (LID) is the task of determining the language of a given text and is a fundamental preprocessing step that affects the reliability of downstream NLP applications. While recent work has expanded LID coverage for…

Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational…

Speech encoders pretrained through self-supervised learning (SSL) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various downstream tasks, including Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). For instance,…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have transformed human-computer interaction; however, low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both research and practical applications. This study…

Recent advancements in Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) have shown promising results in Speaker Verification (SV). However, narrowing the performance gap with supervised systems remains an ongoing challenge. Several studies have observed that…

Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark (SUPERB) is a leaderboard to benchmark the performance of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models on various speech processing tasks. However, SUPERB largely considers English speech in its…

The application of self-supervision to speech representation learning has garnered significant interest in recent years, due to its scalability to large amounts of unlabeled data. However, much progress, both in terms of pre-training and…

Recent advances in self-supervised speech models have shown significant improvement in many downstream tasks. However, these models predominantly centered on frame-level training objectives, which can fall short in spoken language…

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 (SSL) models have demonstrated exceptional performance in various speech tasks, particularly in low-resource and multilingual domains. Recent works show that fusing diverse SSL models could achieve superior…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has been dramatically successful not only in monolingual but also in cross-lingual settings. However, since the two settings have been studied individually in general, there has been little research focusing…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a powerful tool that allows learning of underlying representations from unlabeled data. Transformer based models such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT are leading the field in the speech domain. Generally these…

Whisper is a multitask and multilingual speech model covering 99 languages. It yields commendable automatic speech recognition (ASR) results in a subset of its covered languages, but the model still underperforms on a non-negligible number…

There is a growing interest in cost-effective self-supervised fine-tuning (SSFT) of self-supervised learning (SSL)-based speech models to obtain task-specific representations. These task-specific representations are used for robust…

Recently, masked prediction pre-training has seen remarkable progress in self-supervised learning (SSL) for speech recognition. It usually requires a codebook obtained in an unsupervised way, making it less accurate and difficult to…

Historically lower-level tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker identification are the main focus in the speech field. Interest has been growing in higher-level spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks recently, like…

Self-supervised Transformer based models, such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT, have produced significant improvements over existing approaches to automatic speech recognition (ASR). This is evident in the performance of the wav2vec 2.0 based…