Related papers: Multi-task Pretraining for Enhancing Interpretable…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a reliable approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. Among the plethora of RLHF techniques, proximal policy optimization (PPO) is of the most…

Over the past decade, a series of unflagging efforts have been dedicated to developing highly expressive and controllable text-to-speech (TTS) systems. In general, the holistic TTS comprises two interconnected components: the frontend…

Recent work has shown the feasibility and benefit of bootstrapping an integrated sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) linguistic frontend from a traditional pipeline-based frontend for text-to-speech (TTS). To overcome the fixed lexical coverage…

Foundation models have reshaped the landscape of Remote Sensing (RS) by enhancing various image interpretation tasks. Pretraining is an active research topic, encompassing supervised and self-supervised learning methods to initialize model…

Language models (LMs) are pre-trained on raw text datasets to generate text sequences token-by-token. While this approach facilitates the learning of world knowledge and reasoning, it does not explicitly optimize for linguistic competence.…

This paper describes AraS2P, our speech-to-phonemes system submitted to the Iqra'Eval 2025 Shared Task. We adapted Wav2Vec2-BERT via Two-Stage training strategy. In the first stage, task-adaptive continue pretraining was performed on…

Current soft prompt methods yield limited performance when applied to small-sized models (fewer than a billion parameters). Deep prompt-tuning, which entails prepending parameters in each layer for enhanced efficacy, presents a solution for…

Achieving pronunciation proficiency in a second language (L2) remains a challenge, despite the development of Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems. Traditional CAPT systems often provide unintuitive feedback that lacks…

Recognition of accented speech is a long-standing challenge for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, given the increasing worldwide population of bi-lingual speakers with English as their second language. If we consider…

The automatic identification and analysis of pronunciation errors, known as Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) plays a crucial role in Computer Aided Pronunciation Learning (CAPL) tools such as Second-Language (L2) learning or…

Automatic Pronunciation Assessment (APA) is vital for computer-assisted language learning. Prior methods rely on annotated speech-text data to train Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models or speech-score data to train regression models.…

Despite significant advances in recent years, the existing Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) methods detect pronunciation errors with a relatively low accuracy (precision of 60% at 40%-80% recall). This Ph.D. work proposes…

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 this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal multi-task encoder-decoder pre-training framework (MMSpeech) for Mandarin automatic speech recognition (ASR), which employs both unlabeled speech and text data. The main difficulty in…

For fine-grained generation and recognition tasks such as minimally-supervised text-to-speech (TTS), voice conversion (VC), and automatic speech recognition (ASR), the intermediate representations extracted from speech should serve as a…

Language models (LMs) trained on vast quantities of unlabelled data have greatly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this study, we re-visit the widely accepted notion in NLP that continued pre-training LMs on…

Recent prompt-based text-to-speech (TTS) models can clone an unseen speaker using only a short speech prompt. They leverage a strong in-context ability to mimic the speech prompts, including speaker style, prosody, and emotion. Therefore,…

Characteristic linguistic behaviors associated with Social Language Disorder (SLD) in autism spectrum disorder, including echoic repetition, pronoun displacement, and stereotyped media quoting, are largely absent from spontaneous…

The research community has long studied computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) methods in non-native speech. Researchers focused on studying various model architectures, such as Bayesian networks and deep learning methods, as well…

Spoken Language Assessment (SLA) estimates a learner's oral proficiency from spontaneous speech. The growing population of L2 English speakers has intensified the demand for reliable SLA, a critical component of Computer Assisted Language…