Related papers: On the Language and Gender Biases in PSTN, VoIP an…
Translating from languages without productive grammatical gender like English into gender-marked languages is a well-known difficulty for machines. This difficulty is also due to the fact that the training data on which models are built…
Gender bias in pretrained language models (PLMs) poses significant social and ethical challenges. Despite growing awareness, there is a lack of comprehensive investigation into how different models internally represent and propagate such…
Unlike text, speech conveys information about the speaker, such as gender, through acoustic cues like pitch. This gives rise to modality-specific bias concerns. For example, in speech translation (ST), when translating from languages with…
Neural speech codecs have revolutionized speech coding, achieving higher compression while preserving audio fidelity. Beyond compression, they have emerged as tokenization strategies, enabling language modeling on speech and driving…
The advent of neural audio codecs has increased in popularity due to their potential for efficiently modeling audio with transformers. Such advanced codecs represent audio from a highly continuous waveform to low-sampled discrete units. In…
Speech coding facilitates the transmission of speech over low-bandwidth networks with minimal distortion. Neural-network based speech codecs have recently demonstrated significant improvements in quality over traditional approaches. While…
Critical scholarship has elevated the problem of gender bias in data sets used to train virtual assistants (VAs). Most work has focused on explicit biases in language, especially against women, girls, femme-identifying people, and…
This paper explores the integration of model-based and data-driven approaches within the realm of neural speech and audio coding systems. It highlights the challenges posed by the subjective evaluation processes of speech and audio codecs…
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation architectures mainly differ in the amount of sharing modules and parameters among languages. In this paper, and from an algorithmic perspective, we explore if the chosen architecture, when trained…
Neural audio codec tokens serve as the fundamental building blocks for speech language model (SLM)-based speech generation. However, there is no systematic understanding on how the codec system affects the speech generation performance of…
Numerous studies have shown that machine learning algorithms can latch onto protected attributes such as race and gender and generate predictions that systematically discriminate against one or more groups. To date the majority of bias and…
Neural audio codecs are initially introduced to compress audio data into compact codes to reduce transmission latency. Researchers recently discovered the potential of codecs as suitable tokenizers for converting continuous audio into…
In recent times, voice assistants have become a part of our day-to-day lives, allowing information retrieval by voice synthesis, voice recognition, and natural language processing. These voice assistants can be found in many modern-day…
Multichannel speech enhancement algorithms are essential for improving the intelligibility of speech signals in noisy environments. These algorithms are usually evaluated at the utterance level, but this approach overlooks the disparities…
Neural speech codecs have demonstrated their ability to compress high-quality speech and audio by converting them into discrete token representations. Most existing methods utilize Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) to encode speech into…
Technology for language generation has advanced rapidly, spurred by advancements in pre-training large models on massive amounts of data and the need for intelligent agents to communicate in a natural manner. While techniques can…
Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) process spoken input directly, retaining cues such as accent and perceived gender that were previously removed in cascaded pipelines. This introduces speaker identity dependent variation in…
Recent studies on interpreting the hidden states of speech models have shown their ability to capture speaker-specific features, including gender. Does this finding also hold for speech translation (ST) models? If so, what are the…
Speech language models have significantly advanced in generating realistic speech, with neural codec language models standing out. However, the integration of human feedback to align speech outputs to human preferences is often neglected.…
Several prior works have shown that language models (LMs) can generate text containing harmful social biases and stereotypes. While decoding algorithms play a central role in determining properties of LM generated text, their impact on the…