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Language models (LMs) for text data have been studied extensively for their usefulness in language generation and other downstream tasks. However, language modelling purely in the speech domain is still a relatively unexplored topic, with…

Speaker identification performance is almost perfect in neutral talking environments; however, the performance is deteriorated significantly in shouted talking environments. This work is devoted to proposing, implementing and evaluating new…

State-of-the-art neural language models (LMs) represented by Transformers are highly complex. Their use of fixed, deterministic parameter estimates fail to account for model uncertainty and lead to over-fitting and poor generalization when…

End-to-end (E2E) neural models are increasingly attracting attention as a promising modeling approach for mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD). Typically, these models are trained by optimizing a cross-entropy criterion, which…

Although paralinguistic cues are often considered the primary drivers of speech emotion recognition (SER), we investigate the role of lexical content extracted from speech and show that it can achieve competitive and in some cases higher…

With the success of neural language models (LMs), their language acquisition has gained much attention. This work sheds light on the second language (L2) acquisition of LMs, while previous work has typically explored their first language…

Machine recognition of an atypical speech like whispered speech, is a challenging task. We introduce whisper-to-natural-speech conversion using sequence-to-sequence approach by proposing enhanced transformer architecture, which uses both…

This study investigates whether the phonological features derived from the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon model can be applied in text-to-speech systems to generate native and non-native speech in English and Mandarin. We present a…

We investigate the symmetric Kullback-Leibler (KL2) distance in speaker clustering and its unreported effects for differently-sized feature matrices. Speaker data is represented as Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) vectors, and…

LSTM language models (LSTM-LMs) have been proven to be powerful and yielded significant performance improvements over count based n-gram LMs in modern speech recognition systems. Due to its infinite history states and computational load,…

The most pressing challenge in the field of voice biometrics is selecting the most efficient technique of speaker recognition. Every individual's voice is peculiar, factors like physical differences in vocal organs, accent and pronunciation…

The disparity in phonology between learner's native (L1) and target (L2) language poses a significant challenge for mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) systems. This challenge is further intensified by lack of annotated L2 data.…

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to acquire new behaviors from the input sequence alone without any parameter updates. Recent studies have shown that ICL can surpass the original meaning learned in pretraining…

Speech foundation models (SFMs) are increasingly hailed as powerful computational models of human speech perception. However, since their representations are inherently black-box, it remains unclear what drives their alignment with brain…

Short time spectral features such as mel frequency cepstral coefficients(MFCCs) have been previously deployed in state of the art speaker recognition systems, however lesser heed has been paid to short term spectral features that can be…

Utterances by L2 speakers can be unintelligible due to mispronunciation and improper prosody. In computer-aided language learning systems, textual feedback is often provided using a speech recognition engine. However, an ideal form of…

Currently, the development of Foreign Accent Conversion (FAC) models utilizes deep neural network architectures, as well as ensembles of neural networks for speech recognition and speech generation. The use of these models is limited by…

Pretraining language models on formal language can improve their acquisition of natural language. Which features of the formal language impart an inductive bias that leads to effective transfer? Drawing on insights from linguistics and…

This chapter describes a number of signal-processing and statistical-modeling techniques that are commonly used to calculate likelihood ratios in human-supervised automatic approaches to forensic voice comparison. Techniques described…

This paper presents a new approach for classification of dysfluent and fluent speech using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC). The speech is fluent when person's speech flows easily and smoothly. Sounds combine into syllable,…