Related papers: SLURP-TN : Resource for Tunisian Dialect Spoken La…

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) suffers from the long-tail word problem. This paper exploits contextual biasing, a technique to improve the speech recognition of rare words, in end-to-end SLU systems. Specifically, a…

Task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems help users execute well-defined tasks across a variety of domains (e.g., $\textit{flight booking}$ or $\textit{food ordering}$), with their Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components being dedicated…

Natural language understanding (NLU) is a core component of a spoken dialogue system. Recently recurrent neural networks (RNN) obtained strong results on NLU due to their superior ability of preserving sequential information over time.…

Speech language models (SpeechLMs) accept speech input and produce speech output, allowing for more natural human-computer interaction compared to text-based large language models (LLMs). Traditional approaches for developing SpeechLMs are…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has helped extend speech technologies to more languages by reducing the need for labeled data. However, models are still far from supporting the world's 7000+ languages. We propose XEUS, a Cross-lingual…

Sign language is an essential means of communication for millions of people around the world and serves as their primary language. However, most communication tools are developed for spoken and written languages which can cause problems and…

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) models are a class of model architectures that predict semantics directly from speech. Because of their input and output types, we refer to them as speech-to-interpretation (STI) models.…

Nowadays, dialogue systems are used in many fields of industry and research. There are successful instances of these systems, such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and IBM Watson. Task-oriented dialogue system is a category of these, that…

Lipreading involves using visual data to recognize spoken words by analyzing the movements of the lips and surrounding area. It is a hot research topic with many potential applications, such as human-machine interaction and enhancing audio…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) converts hypotheses from automatic speech recognizer (ASR) into structured semantic representations. ASR recognition errors can severely degenerate the performance of the subsequent SLU module. To address…

Despite recent progress in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), the creation of multilingual NLU systems remains a challenge. It is common to have NLU systems limited to a subset of languages due to lack of available data. They also often…

Spurred by recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), virtual assistants are poised to take a leap forward in terms of their dialogue capabilities. Yet a major bottleneck to achieving genuinely transformative task-oriented dialogue…

Building Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) robust to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) errors is an essential issue for various voice-enabled virtual assistants. Considering that most ASR errors are caused by phonetic confusion between…

Despite remarkable progress in large language models, Urdu-a language spoken by over 230 million people-remains critically underrepresented in modern NLP systems. Existing multilingual models demonstrate poor performance on Urdu-specific…

Audio large language models (AudioLLMs) enable instruction-following over speech and general audio, but progress is increasingly limited by the lack of diverse, conversational, instruction-aligned speech-text data. This bottleneck is…

Polyphone disambiguation aims to capture accurate pronunciation knowledge from natural text sequences for reliable Text-to-speech (TTS) systems. However, previous approaches require substantial annotated training data and additional efforts…

Classifying Sorani Kurdish subdialects poses a challenge due to the need for publicly available datasets or reliable resources like social media or websites for data collection. We conducted field visits to various cities and villages to…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is rapidly transforming research methodologies across disciplines, yet African languages remain largely underrepresented in this technological shift. This paper provides the first comprehensive overview of…

Speech inherently contains rich acoustic information that extends far beyond the textual language. In real-world spoken language understanding, effective interpretation often requires integrating semantic meaning (e.g., content),…

Existing conversational systems are mostly agent-centric, which assumes the user utterances would closely follow the system ontology (for NLU or dialogue state tracking). However, in real-world scenarios, it is highly desirable that the…