Related papers: POWSM: A Phonetic Open Whisper-Style Speech Founda…

A crucial part of an accurate and reliable spoken language assessment system is the underlying ASR model. Recently, large-scale pre-trained ASR foundation models such as Whisper have been made available. As the output of these models is…

Currently, a common approach in many speech processing tasks is to leverage large scale pre-trained models by fine-tuning them on in-domain data for a particular application. Yet obtaining even a small amount of such data can be…

Benefiting from massive and diverse data sources, speech foundation models exhibit strong generalization and knowledge transfer capabilities to a wide range of downstream tasks. However, a limitation arises from their exclusive handling of…

Current state of the art acoustic models can easily comprise more than 100 million parameters. This growing complexity demands larger training datasets to maintain a decent generalization of the final decision function. An ideal dataset is…

Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) is an essential first step in any modern, high-quality Text-to-Speech (TTS) system. Most of the current G2P systems rely on carefully hand-crafted lexicons developed by experts. This poses a two-fold problem.…

Recent years have witnessed significant improvement in ASR systems to recognize spoken utterances. However, it is still a challenging task for noisy and out-of-domain data, where substitution and deletion errors are prevalent in the…

In recent years, the standard hybrid DNN-HMM speech recognizers are outperformed by the end-to-end speech recognition systems. One of the very promising approaches is the grapheme Wav2Vec 2.0 model, which uses the self-supervised…

Whispered speech lacks vocal fold vibration and fundamental frequency, resulting in degraded acoustic cues and making whisper-to-normal (W2N) conversion challenging, especially with limited parallel data. We propose WhispEar, a…

Phonetic information and linguistic knowledge are an essential component of a Text-to-speech (TTS) front-end. Given a language, a lexicon can be collected offline and Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) relationships are usually modeled in order to…

Speech foundation models (SFMs), such as Open Whisper-Style Speech Models (OWSM), are trained on massive datasets to achieve accurate automatic speech recognition. However, even SFMs struggle to accurately recognize rare and unseen words.…

We propose a first step toward multilingual end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) by integrating knowledge about speech articulators. The key idea is to leverage a rich set of fundamental units that can be defined "universally"…

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…

Grapheme-based acoustic modeling has recently been shown to outperform phoneme-based approaches in both hybrid and end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR), even on non-phonemic languages like English. However, graphemic ASR still has…

We propose PolyVoice, a language model-based framework for speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) system. Our framework consists of two language models: a translation language model and a speech synthesis language model. We use discretized…

In the traditional cascading architecture for spoken language understanding (SLU), it has been observed that automatic speech recognition errors could be detrimental to the performance of natural language understanding. End-to-end (E2E) SLU…

Generating 3D speech-driven talking head has received more and more attention in recent years. Recent approaches mainly have following limitations: 1) most speaker-independent methods need handcrafted features that are time-consuming to…

In this paper, we explore the untapped potential of Whisper, a well-established automatic speech recognition (ASR) foundation model, in the context of L2 spoken language assessment (SLA). Unlike prior studies that extrinsically analyze…

Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion is a crucial step in Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, responsible for mapping grapheme to corresponding phonetic representations. However, it faces ambiguities problems where the same grapheme can represent…

Despite being trained exclusively on speech data, speech foundation models (SFMs) like Whisper have shown impressive performance in non-speech tasks such as audio classification. This is partly because speech shares some common traits with…

End-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems directly map acoustics to words using a unified model. Previous works mostly focus on E2E training a single model which integrates acoustic and language model into a whole.…