Related papers: Multi-task Pretraining for Enhancing Interpretable…

Learners of a second language (L2) often map non-native phonemes to similar native-language (L1) phonemes, making conventional L2-focused training slow and effortful. To address this, we propose an L1-grounded pronunciation training method…

Pause insertion, also known as phrase break prediction and phrasing, is an essential part of TTS systems because proper pauses with natural duration significantly enhance the rhythm and intelligibility of synthetic speech. However,…

Multi-task learning (MTL) has recently contributed to learning better representations in service of various NLP tasks. MTL aims at improving the performance of a primary task, by jointly training on a secondary task. This paper introduces…

Prompting has recently been shown as a promising approach for applying pre-trained language models to perform downstream tasks. We present Multi-Stage Prompting (MSP), a simple and automatic approach for leveraging pre-trained language…

In the field of universal automatic phonetic transcription (APT), clean and diverse training transcriptions are required. However, such high-quality data is limited. We propose the bootstrapping approach Selective Augmentation to improve…

Table pretrain-then-finetune paradigm has been proposed and employed at a rapid pace after the success of pre-training in the natural language domain. Despite the promising findings in tabular pre-trained language models (TPLMs), there is…

Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is an emerging technology with a primary goal to assist the knowledge worker by taking care of repetitive, routine and low-cognitive tasks. Conversational agents that can interact with users in a natural…

For unsupervised pretraining, mask-reconstruction pretraining (MRP) approaches, e.g. MAE and data2vec, randomly mask input patches and then reconstruct the pixels or semantic features of these masked patches via an auto-encoder. Then for a…

In expressive and controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS), explicit prosodic features significantly improve the naturalness and controllability of synthesised speech. However, manual prosody annotation is labor-intensive and inconsistent. To…

Audio-visual multi-task incremental learning aims to continuously learn from multiple audio-visual tasks without the need for joint training on all tasks. The challenge of the problem is how to preserve the old task knowledge while…

Large pre-trained speech models are widely used as the de-facto paradigm, especially in scenarios when there is a limited amount of labeled data available. However, finetuning all parameters from the self-supervised learned model can be…

Evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has raised great concerns in the community due to the issue of data contamination. Existing work designed evaluation protocols using well-defined algorithms for specific tasks, which cannot be…

Fitting complex patterns in the training data, such as reasoning and commonsense, is a key challenge for language pre-training. According to recent studies and our empirical observations, one possible reason is that some easy-to-fit…

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is designed to train multiple correlated tasks simultaneously, thereby enhancing the performance of individual tasks. Typically, a multi-task network structure consists of a shared backbone and task-specific…

Multi-task learning (MTL) has been successfully used in many real-world applications, which aims to simultaneously solve multiple tasks with a single model. The general idea of multi-task learning is designing kinds of global parameter…

The paper copes with the task of automatic assessment of second language proficiency from the language learners' spoken responses to test prompts. The task has significant relevance to the field of computer assisted language learning. The…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are machine learning models that have seen widespread adoption due to their capability of handling previously difficult tasks. LLMs, due to their training, are sensitive to how exactly a question is presented,…

Pre-trained neural language models bring significant improvement for various NLP tasks, by fine-tuning the models on task-specific training sets. During fine-tuning, the parameters are initialized from pre-trained models directly, which…

We present an efficient end-to-end approach for holistic Automatic Speaking Assessment (ASA) of multi-part second-language tests, developed for the 2025 Speak & Improve Challenge. Our system's main novelty is the ability to process all four…

This paper presents an accented text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis framework with limited training data. We study two aspects concerning accent rendering: phonetic (phoneme difference) and prosodic (pitch pattern and phoneme duration)…