Related papers: LID Models are Actually Accent Classifiers: Implic…

Language identification is critical for many downstream tasks in automatic speech recognition (ASR), and is beneficial to integrate into multilingual end-to-end ASR as an additional task. In this paper, we propose to modify the structure of…

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.…

Recent advances in eXplainable AI (XAI) have provided new insights into how models for vision, language, and tabular data operate. However, few approaches exist for understanding speech models. Existing work focuses on a few spoken language…

We introduce TitaNet-LID, a compact end-to-end neural network for Spoken Language Identification (LID) that is based on the ContextNet architecture. TitaNet-LID employs 1D depth-wise separable convolutions and Squeeze-and-Excitation layers…

Thus far, end-to-end (E2E) models have not been shown to outperform state-of-the-art conventional models with respect to both quality, i.e., word error rate (WER), and latency, i.e., the time the hypothesis is finalized after the user stops…

In this paper, we show that a simple self-supervised pre-trained audio model can achieve comparable inference efficiency to more complicated pre-trained models with speech transformer encoders. These speech transformers rely on mixing…

Local dialects influence people to pronounce words of the same language differently from each other. The great variability and complex characteristics of accents creates a major challenge for training a robust and accent-agnostic automatic…

Despite recent technology advancements, the effectiveness of neural approaches to end-to-end speech-to-text translation is still limited by the paucity of publicly available training corpora. We tackle this limitation with a method to…

Accents play a pivotal role in shaping human communication, enhancing our ability to convey and comprehend messages with clarity and cultural nuance. While there has been significant progress in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR),…

We previously proposed contextual spelling correction (CSC) to correct the output of end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models with contextual information such as name, place, etc. Although CSC has achieved reasonable…

While Transformer has become the de-facto standard for speech, modeling upon the fine-grained frame-level features remains an open challenge of capturing long-distance dependencies and distributing the attention weights. We propose…

This paper studies contextual biasing with Large Language Models (LLMs), where during second-pass rescoring additional contextual information is provided to a LLM to boost Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) performance. We propose to…

The evaluation of cross-lingual semantic search models is often limited to existing datasets from tasks such as information retrieval and semantic textual similarity. We introduce Cross-Lingual Semantic Discrimination (CLSD), a lightweight…

Attention-based contextual biasing approaches have shown significant improvements in the recognition of generic and/or personal rare-words in End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition (E2E ASR) systems like neural transducers. These…

We introduce SLED, an alternative approach to speech language modeling by encoding speech waveforms into sequences of continuous latent representations and modeling them autoregressively using an energy distance objective. The energy…

Speech language models (Speech LMs) enable end-to-end speech-text modeling within a single model, offering a promising direction for spoken dialogue systems. The choice of speech-text jointly decoding paradigm plays a critical role in…

Large language models (LLMs) are ubiquitous in modern day natural language processing. However, previous work has shown degraded LLM performance for under-represented English dialects. We analyze the effects of typifying "standard" American…

Recent years have seen a growing number of publications that analyse Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets for superficial cues, whether they undermine the complexity of the tasks underlying those datasets and how they impact those…

Modern approaches to text to speech require the entire input character sequence to be processed before any audio is synthesised. This latency limits the suitability of such models for time-sensitive tasks like simultaneous interpretation.…

Replacing hand-engineered pipelines with end-to-end deep learning systems has enabled strong results in applications like speech and object recognition. However, the causality and latency constraints of production systems put end-to-end…