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Pre-trained language models have revolutionized the natural language understanding landscape, most notably BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). However, a significant challenge remains for low-resource languages,…

This paper proposes the creation of a Swahili Question Answering (QA) benchmark dataset, aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of Swahili in natural language processing (NLP). Drawing from established benchmarks like SQuAD, GLUE,…

The performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) has improved tremendously due to the application of deep neural networks (DNNs). Despite this progress, building a new ASR system remains a challenging task, requiring various resources,…

The SENCOTEN language, spoken on the Saanich peninsula of southern Vancouver Island, is in the midst of vigorous language revitalization efforts to turn the tide of language loss as a result of colonial language policies. To support these…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has helped extend speech technologies to more languages by reducing the need for labeled data. However, models are still far from supporting the world's 7000+ languages. We propose XEUS, a Cross-lingual…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) system usually consists of various pipeline components, where each component heavily relies on the results of its upstream ones. For example, Intent detection (ID), and slot filling (SF) require its…

Minority languages are vital to preserving cultural heritage, yet they face growing risks of extinction due to limited digital resources and the dominance of artificial intelligence models trained on high-resource languages. This white…

Speech datasets available in the public domain are often underutilized because of challenges in discoverability and interoperability. A comprehensive framework has been designed to survey, catalog, and curate available speech datasets,…

Large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) systems are limited by the scarcity of clean, multilingual recordings. We introduce Sidon, a fast, open-source speech restoration model that converts noisy in-the-wild speech into studio-quality speech and…

The paper proposes an approach to transcend multicultural and multilingual barriers in the use and reuse of geographical data at the European level. The approach aims at sharing scientific terms in the field of nature conservation with the…

The challenge of fairness arises when Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems do not perform equally well for all sub-groups of the population. In the past few years there have been many improvements in overall speech recognition…

This paper describes the NTNU ASR system participating in the Interspeech 2020 Non-Native Children's Speech ASR Challenge supported by the SIG-CHILD group of ISCA. This ASR shared task is made much more challenging due to the coexisting…

The vision of an inclusive World Wide Web is impeded by a severe linguistic divide, particularly for communities in low-resource regions of Southeast Asia. While large language models (LLMs) offer a potential solution for translation, their…

In this paper, we present a new open source toolkit for speech recognition, named CAT (CTC-CRF based ASR Toolkit). CAT inherits the data-efficiency of the hybrid approach and the simplicity of the E2E approach, providing a full-fledged…

Low-resource African languages have not fully benefited from the progress in neural machine translation because of a lack of data. Motivated by this challenge we compare zero-shot learning, transfer learning and multilingual learning on…

Spoken Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for speech synthesis by bypassing explicit grapheme-to-phoneme pipelines. However, their effectiveness in low-resource languages remains fundamentally limited by the…

This work proposes FireRedTTS, a foundation text-to-speech framework, to meet the growing demands for personalized and diverse generative speech applications. The framework comprises three parts: data processing, foundation system, and…

While automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have achieved remarkable performance with large-scale datasets, their efficacy remains inadequate in low-resource settings, encompassing dialects, accents, minority languages, and long-tail…

This research presents Muskits-ESPnet, a versatile toolkit that introduces new paradigms to Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) through the application of pretrained audio models in both continuous and discrete approaches. Specifically, we…

The IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) 2021 Alpha-mini Speech Challenge (ASC) is intended to improve research on keyword spotting (KWS) and sound source location (SSL) on humanoid robots. Many publications report significant…