Related papers: Enhancing nonnative speech perception and producti…

In this paper, we present several adaptation methods for non-native speech recognition. We have tested pronunciation modelling, MLLR and MAP non-native pronunciation adaptation and HMM models retraining on the HIWIRE foreign accented…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have attained unprecedented performance with large speech models pre-trained based on self-supervised speech representation learning. However, these pre-trained speech models suffer from…

Human talkers often address listeners with language-comprehension challenges, such as hard-of-hearing or non-native adults, by globally slowing down their speech. However, it remains unclear whether this strategy actually makes speech more…

Previous work has established that a person's demographics and speech style affect how well speech processing models perform for them. But where does this bias come from? In this work, we present the Speech Embedding Association Test…

Speaker recognition, recognizing speaker identities based on voice alone, enables important downstream applications, such as personalization and authentication. Learning speaker representations, in the context of supervised learning,…

Speech fluency/disfluency can be evaluated by analyzing a range of phonetic and prosodic features. Deep neural networks are commonly trained to map fluency-related features into the human scores. However, the effectiveness of deep…

Monaural speech enhancement has made dramatic advances since the introduction of deep learning a few years ago. Although enhanced speech has been demonstrated to have better intelligibility and quality for human listeners, feeding it…

Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI) involves mapping from the acoustic to the articulatory space. Signal-processing features like the MFCCs, have been widely used for the AAI task. For subjects with dysarthric speech, AAI is…

Speech communication systems based on Voice-over-IP technology are frequently used by native as well as non-native speakers of a target language, e.g. in international phone calls or telemeetings. Frequently, such calls also occur in a…

Contrastive learning has become a popular approach in natural language processing, particularly for the learning of sentence embeddings. However, the discrete nature of natural language makes it difficult to ensure the quality of positive…

Human perception of surrounding events is strongly dependent on audio cues. Thus, acoustic insulation can seriously impact situational awareness. We present an exploratory study in the domain of assistive computing, eliciting requirements…

Neural network models for audio tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and acoustic scene classification (ASC), are susceptible to noise contamination for real-life applications. To improve audio quality, an enhancement module,…

Articulatory-to-acoustic (forward) mapping is a technique to predict speech using various articulatory acquisition techniques as input (e.g. ultrasound tongue imaging, MRI, lip video). The advantage of lip video is that it is easily…

This paper evaluates the impact of training undergraduate students to improve their audio deepfake discernment ability by listening for expert-defined linguistic features. Such features have been shown to improve performance of AI…

In mobile speech communication applications, wind noise can lead to a severe reduction of speech quality and intelligibility. Since the performance of speech enhancement algorithms using acoustic microphones tends to substantially degrade…

As large language models (LLMs) expand multilingual capabilities, questions remain about the equity of their performance across languages. While many communities stand to benefit from AI systems, the dominance of English in training data…

This study examined whether AI-mediated speaking practice can reduce acculturative stress among Chinese international students in UK universities. Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, 126 participants were randomly assigned…

The research community has long studied computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) methods in non-native speech. Researchers focused on studying various model architectures, such as Bayesian networks and deep learning methods, as well…

In the software industry, artificial intelligence (AI) has been utilized more and more in software development activities. In some activities, such as coding, AI has already been an everyday tool, but in software testing activities AI it…

Second language (L2) English learners often find it difficult to improve their pronunciations due to the lack of expressive and personalized corrective feedback. In this paper, we present Pronunciation Teacher (PTeacher), a Computer-Aided…