Related papers: Automatic Proficiency Assessment in L2 English Lea…

Stuttering is a varied speech disorder that harms an individual's communication ability. Persons who stutter (PWS) often use speech therapy to cope with their condition. Improving speech recognition systems for people with such non-typical…

A number of methods have been proposed for End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding (E2E-SLU) using pretrained models, however their evaluation often lacks multilingual setup and tasks that require prediction of lexical fillers, such as…

Automatic Pronunciation Assessment (APA) plays a vital role in Computer-assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) when evaluating a second language (L2) learner's speaking proficiency. However, an apparent downside of most de facto methods is…

For high data rate wireless communication systems, developing an efficient channel estimation approach is extremely vital for channel detection and signal recovery. With the trend of high-mobility wireless communications between vehicles…

Relying on human experts to evaluate CEFR speaking assessments in an e-learning environment creates scalability challenges, as it limits how quickly and widely assessments can be conducted. We aim to automate the evaluation of CEFR B2…

Using NLP to analyze authentic learner language helps to build automated assessment and feedback tools. It also offers new and extensive insights into the development of second language production. However, there is a lack of research…

Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) is a critical task for designing effective retrieval-based Question Answering (QA) systems. Most advancements in AS2 focus on English due to the scarcity of annotated datasets for other languages. This lack…

General-purpose ASR underperforms for atypical speakers, such as L2 learners, reinforcing bias and limiting use in education and accessibility. Using the CEFR-graded Speak and Improve corpus, we show that naive fine-tuning of Whisper…

We present a study on the design of multilingual Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) models, which are a core component of modern Question Answering (QA) systems. The main idea is to transfer data, created from one resource rich language, e.g.,…

Self-supervised learning methods such as wav2vec 2.0 have shown promising results in learning speech representations from unlabelled and untranscribed speech data that are useful for speech recognition. Since these representations are…

Recently, end-to-end (E2E) models, which allow to take spectral vector sequences of L2 (second-language) learners' utterances as input and produce the corresponding phone-level sequences as output, have attracted much research attention in…

Large, pre-trained neural networks consisting of self-attention layers (transformers) have recently achieved state-of-the-art results on several speech emotion recognition (SER) datasets. These models are typically pre-trained in…

Recent advances in deep learning based large vocabulary con- tinuous speech recognition (LVCSR) invoke growing demands in large scale speech transcription. The inference process of a speech recognizer is to find a sequence of labels whose…

A long-standing question in automatic speech recognition research is how to attribute errors to the ability of a model to model the acoustics, versus its ability to leverage higher-order context (lexicon, morphology, syntax, semantics). We…

The existing fake audio detection systems often rely on expert experience to design the acoustic features or manually design the hyperparameters of the network structure. However, artificial adjustment of the parameters can have a…

We introduce Wav2Seq, the first self-supervised approach to pre-train both parts of encoder-decoder models for speech data. We induce a pseudo language as a compact discrete representation, and formulate a self-supervised pseudo speech…

Automatically assessing emotional valence in human speech has historically been a difficult task for machine learning algorithms. The subtle changes in the voice of the speaker that are indicative of positive or negative emotional states…

This paper introduces an automated framework WSW2.0 for analyzing vocal interactions in preschool classrooms, enhancing both accuracy and scalability through the integration of wav2vec2-based speaker classification and Whisper (large-v2 and…

This study asks how self-supervised speech models represent suprasegmental categories like Mandarin lexical tone, English lexical stress, and English phrasal accents. Through a series of probing tasks, we make layer-wise comparisons of…

Self-supervised speech models have grown fast during the past few years and have proven feasible for use in various downstream tasks. Some recent work has started to look at the characteristics of these models, yet many concerns have not…