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As LLMs reduce English-centric bias, a surprising trend emerges: non-English responses sometimes outperform English on reasoning tasks. We hypothesize that language functions as a latent variable that structurally modulates the model's…

In this work, we introduce BanglaBERT, a BERT-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model pretrained in Bangla, a widely spoken yet low-resource language in the NLP literature. To pretrain BanglaBERT, we collect 27.5 GB of Bangla…

Large-scale datasets have successively proven their fundamental importance in several research fields, especially for early progress in some emerging topics. In this paper, we focus on the problem of visual speech recognition, also known as…

The advancement of speech technologies has been remarkable, yet its integration with African languages remains limited due to the scarcity of African speech corpora. To address this issue, we present AfroDigits, a minimalist,…

People have long hoped for a conversational system that can assist in real-life situations, and recent progress on large language models (LLMs) is bringing this idea closer to reality. While LLMs are often impressive in performance, their…

This paper summarizes the Interspeech2025 Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Model (MLC-SLM) challenge, which aims to advance the exploration of building effective multilingual conversational speech LLMs (SLLMs). We provide a…

Context: User intent modeling is a crucial process in Natural Language Processing that aims to identify the underlying purpose behind a user's request, enabling personalized responses. With a vast array of approaches introduced in the…

Despite recent availability of large transcribed Kinyarwanda speech data, achieving robust speech recognition for Kinyarwanda is still challenging. In this work, we show that using self-supervised pre-training, following a simple curriculum…

Intent Classification (IC) and Slot Labeling (SL) models, which form the basis of dialogue systems, often encounter noisy data in real-word environments. In this work, we investigate how robust IC/SL models are to noisy data. We collect and…

We evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models in multilingual settings. We introduce the Multilingual Grade School Math (MGSM) benchmark, by manually translating 250 grade-school math problems from the GSM8K dataset (Cobbe et…

This paper describes the Ubenwa CryCeleb dataset - a labeled collection of infant cries - and the accompanying CryCeleb 2023 task, which is a public speaker verification challenge based on cry sounds. We released more than 6 hours of…

This paper presents a high-quality dataset for evaluating the quality of Bangla word embeddings, which is a fundamental task in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Despite being the 7th most-spoken language in the world, Bangla…

This paper introduces Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS) dataset, a large multilingual corpus suitable for speech research. The dataset is derived from read audiobooks from LibriVox and consists of 8 languages, including about 44.5K hours of…

The Fon language, spoken by an average 2 million of people, is a truly low-resourced African language, with a limited online presence, and existing datasets (just to name but a few). Multitask learning is a learning paradigm that aims to…

This paper explores the potential universality of neural vocoders. We train a WaveRNN-based vocoder on 74 speakers coming from 17 languages. This vocoder is shown to be capable of generating speech of consistently good quality (98% relative…

This paper proposes a novel approach that uses deep neural networks for classifying imagined speech, significantly increasing the classification accuracy. The proposed approach employs only the EEG channels over specific areas of the brain…

Automatic speech recognition systems have undoubtedly advanced with the integration of multilingual and multitask models such as Whisper, which have shown a promising ability to understand and process speech across a wide range of…

Neural scaling laws offer valuable insights for designing robust sequence processing architectures. While these laws have been extensively characterized in other modalities, their behavior in speech remains comparatively underexplored. In…

In today's digitally driven world, dialogue systems play a pivotal role in enhancing user interactions, from customer service to virtual assistants. In these dialogues, it is important to identify user's goals automatically to resolve their…

Low-resource languages serve as invaluable repositories of human history, preserving cultural and intellectual diversity. Despite their significance, they remain largely absent from modern natural language processing systems. While progress…