Related papers: Challenges in Automated Processing of Speech from …
Audio-recordings collected with a child-worn device are a fundamental tool in child language research. Long-form recordings collected over whole days promise to capture children's input and production with minimal observer bias, and…
Children are one of the most under-represented groups in speech technologies, as well as one of the most vulnerable in terms of privacy. Despite this, anonymization techniques targeting this population have received little attention. In…
Naturalistic recordings capture audio in real-world environments where participants behave naturally without interference from researchers or experimental protocols. Naturalistic long-form recordings extend this concept by capturing…
Spontaneous conversations in real-world settings such as those found in child-centered recordings have been shown to be amongst the most challenging audio files to process. Nevertheless, building speech processing models handling such a…
Automated Speech Recognition shows superhuman performance for adult English speech on a range of benchmarks, but disappoints when fed children's speech. This has long sat in the way of child-robot interaction. Recent evolutions in…
A key desiderata for inclusive and accessible speech recognition technology is ensuring its robust performance to children's speech. Notably, this includes the rapidly advancing neural network based end-to-end speech recognition systems.…
Speaker identity is one of the important characteristics of human speech. In voice conversion, we change the speaker identity from one to another, while keeping the linguistic content unchanged. Voice conversion involves multiple speech…
Speech technology systems struggle with many downstream tasks for child speech due to small training corpora and the difficulties that child speech pose. We apply a novel dataset, SpeechMaturity, to state-of-the-art transformer models to…
During their first years of life, infants learn the language(s) of their environment at an amazing speed despite large cross cultural variations in amount and complexity of the available language input. Understanding this simple fact still…
Recent advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, exemplified by Whisper, have demonstrated the potential of these systems to approach human-level performance given sufficient data. However, this progress doesn't readily…
Children's speech recognition is considered a low-resource task mainly due to the lack of publicly available data. There are several reasons for such data scarcity, including expensive data collection and annotation processes, and data…
Machine learning techniques have proved useful for classifying and analyzing audio content. However, recent methods typically rely on abstract and high-dimensional representations that are difficult to interpret. Inspired by…
Children's speech recognition is a vital, yet largely overlooked domain when building inclusive speech technologies. The major challenge impeding progress in this domain is the lack of adequate child speech corpora; however, recent advances…
This paper presents a brief survey on Automatic Speech Recognition and discusses the major themes and advances made in the past 60 years of research, so as to provide a technological perspective and an appreciation of the fundamental…
The emergence of voice-assistant devices ushers in delightful user experiences not just on the smart home front, but also in diverse educational environments from classrooms to personalized-learning/tutoring. However, the use of voice as an…
Instruction-based speech processing is becoming popular. Studies show that training with multiple tasks boosts performance, but collecting diverse, large-scale tasks and datasets is expensive. Thus, it is highly desirable to design a…
Use of speech models for automatic speech processing tasks can improve efficiency in the screening, analysis, diagnosis and treatment in medicine and psychiatry. However, the performance of pre-processing speech tasks like segmentation and…
Studying early speech development at scale requires automatic tools, yet automatic phoneme recognition, especially for young children, remains largely unsolved. Building on decades of data collection, we curate TinyVox, a corpus of more…
Computational modeling of naturalistic conversations in clinical applications has seen growing interest in the past decade. An important use-case involves child-adult interactions within the autism diagnosis and intervention domain. In this…
Distinguishing scripted from spontaneous speech is an essential tool for better understanding how speech styles influence speech processing research. It can also improve recommendation systems and discovery experiences for media users…