Related papers: Zero-Shot Speech LLMs for Multi-Aspect Evaluation …

Reliable and interpretable automated assessment of second-language (L2) speech remains a central challenge, as large speech-language models (SpeechLLMs) often struggle to align with the nuanced variability of human raters. To address this,…

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…

With the aim to provide teachers with more specific, frequent, and actionable feedback about their teaching, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to estimate ``Instructional Support'' domain scores of the CLassroom…

Wav2Prompt is proposed which allows straightforward integration between spoken input and a text-based large language model (LLM). Wav2Prompt uses a simple training process with only the same data used to train an automatic speech…

Grammar competency estimation is essential for assessing linguistic proficiency in both written and spoken language; however, the spoken modality presents additional challenges due to its spontaneous, unstructured, and disfluent nature.…

Natural language-based assessment (NLA) is an approach to second language assessment that uses instructions - expressed in the form of can-do descriptors - originally intended for human examiners, aiming to determine whether large language…

Speech large language models (speech-LLMs) integrate speech and text-based foundation models to provide a unified framework for handling a wide range of downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce WHISMA, a speech-LLM tailored for spoken…

Cognitive impairment (CI) is of growing public health concern, and early detection is vital for effective intervention. Speech has gained attention as a non-invasive and easily collectible biomarker for assessing cognitive decline.…

Automatic pronunciation assessment is typically performed by acoustic models trained on audio-score pairs. Although effective, these systems provide only numerical scores, without the information needed to help learners understand their…

Despite growing interest in automated hate speech detection, most existing approaches overlook the linguistic diversity of online content. Multilingual instruction-tuned large language models such as LLaMA, Aya, Qwen, and BloomZ offer…

Real-time, intelligent, and natural speech interaction is an essential part of the next-generation human-computer interaction. Recent advancements have showcased the potential of building intelligent spoken chatbots based on large language…

Large language models (LLMs), renowned for their powerful conversational abilities, are widely recognized as exceptional tools in the field of education, particularly in the context of automated intelligent instruction systems for language…

We investigate the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for zero-shot prediction of Ryff Psychological Well-Being (PWB) scores from spontaneous speech. Using a few minutes of voice recordings from 111 participants in the PsyVoiD database, we…

This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning -- finetuning language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions -- substantially…

The purpose of instruction tuning is enabling zero-shot performance, but instruction tuning has also been shown to improve chain-of-thought reasoning and value alignment (Si et al., 2023). Here we consider the impact on…

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive language understanding and the capacity to generate responses that follow specific prompts. However, due to the computational demands associated with training these…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving, providing accurate feedback and scalable oversight on their outputs becomes an urgent and critical problem. Leveraging LLMs as critique models to achieve automated supervision is a…

Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as scalable tools to address the gap between the importance of individualized written feedback and the practical challenges of providing it at scale. However, concerns persist regarding the…

This study demonstrates that a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) adapted via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) can perform both Automatic Pronunciation Assessment (APA) and Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) simultaneously.…

Reading fluency assessment is a critical component of literacy programmes, serving to guide and monitor early education interventions. Given the resource intensive nature of the exercise when conducted by teachers, the development of…