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

Human language can be expressed in either written or spoken form, i.e. text or speech. Humans can acquire knowledge from text to improve speaking and listening. However, the quest for speech pre-trained models to leverage unpaired text has…

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) combines lip-based video with audio and can improve performance in noise, but most methods are trained only on English data. One limitation is the lack of large-scale multilingual video data, which…

We present a method for transferring pre-trained self-supervised (SSL) speech representations to multiple languages. There is an abundance of unannotated speech, so creating self-supervised representations from raw audio and fine-tuning on…

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…

Recent work has shown that it is possible to train an $\textit{unsupervised}$ automatic speech recognition (ASR) system using only unpaired audio and text. Existing unsupervised ASR methods assume that no labeled data can be used for…

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…

Automating dysarthria assessments offers the opportunity to develop practical, low-cost tools that address the current limitations of manual and subjective assessments. Nonetheless, the small size of most dysarthria datasets makes it…

Language identification (LID) is a crucial precursor for NLP, especially for mining web data. Problematically, most of the world's 7000+ languages today are not covered by LID technologies. We address this pressing issue for Africa by…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have achieved remarkable performance on widely used benchmarks such as LibriSpeech and Fleurs. However, these benchmarks do not adequately reflect the complexities of real-world conversational…

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…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has made significant advances in speech representation learning. Models like wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT have achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as speech recognition, particularly in monolingual…

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 this paper, we investigate the use of N-gram models and Large Pre-trained Multilingual models for Language Identification (LID) across 11 South African languages. For N-gram models, this study shows that effective data size selection…

One of the major challenges for developing automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages is the limited access to labeled data with domain-specific variations. In this study, we propose a pseudo-labeling approach to develop…

Self-supervised speech representation learning methods like wav2vec 2.0 and Hidden-unit BERT (HuBERT) leverage unlabeled speech data for pre-training and offer good representations for numerous speech processing tasks. Despite the success…

Automatic speech recognition systems have undoubtedly advanced with the integration of multilingual and multitask models such as Whisper, which have shown a promising ability to understand and process speech across a wide range of…

Expanding the language coverage of speech technology has the potential to improve access to information for many more people. However, current speech technology is restricted to about one hundred languages which is a small fraction of the…

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has made great strides recently. SSL speech models achieve decent performance on a wide range of downstream tasks, suggesting that they extract different aspects of information from speech. However, how SSL…

The INTERSPEECH 2025 Challenge on Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Models (MLC-SLM) promotes multilingual conversational ASR with large language models (LLMs). Our previous SHNU-mASR system adopted a competitive…

Training state-of-the-art Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) models typically requires a substantial amount of transcribed speech. In this work, we demonstrate that a modality-matched joint speech and text model can be leveraged to train a…