Related papers: Effects of Language Modeling on Speech-driven Ques…

Interacting with a speech interface to query a Question Answering (QA) system is becoming increasingly popular. Typically, QA systems rely on passage retrieval to select candidate contexts and reading comprehension to extract the final…

Spoken question answering (SQA) is challenging due to complex reasoning on top of the spoken documents. The recent studies have also shown the catastrophic impact of automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors on SQA. Therefore, this work…

Text-based machine comprehension (MC) systems have a wide-range of applications, and standard corpora exist for developing and evaluating approaches. There has been far less research on spoken question answering (SQA) systems. The SQA task…

Speech-based open-domain question answering (QA over a large corpus of text passages with spoken questions) has emerged as an important task due to the increasing number of users interacting with QA systems via speech interfaces. Passage…

In this work, we introduce a simple yet efficient post-processing model for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our model has Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture which "translates" ASR model output into grammatically and…

Despite the success of end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, challenges persist in recognizing rare, out-of-vocabulary words - including named entities (NE) - and in adapting to new domains using only text data. This work…

One common approach for question answering over speech data is to first transcribe speech using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and then employ text-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on the transcriptions. While this cascaded…

Virtual assistants make use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) to help users answer entity-centric queries. However, spoken entity recognition is a difficult problem, due to the large number of frequently-changing named entities. In…

Conversational speech normally is embodied with loose syntactic structures at the utterance level but simultaneously exhibits topical coherence relations across consecutive utterances. Prior work has shown that capturing longer context…

Question answering (QA) systems are among the most important and rapidly developing research topics in natural language processing (NLP). A reason, therefore, is that a QA system allows humans to interact more naturally with a machine,…

This paper introduces speech-based visual question answering (VQA), the task of generating an answer given an image and a spoken question. Two methods are studied: an end-to-end, deep neural network that directly uses audio waveforms as…

At the present time, computers are employed to solve complex tasks and problems ranging from simple calculations to intensive digital image processing and intricate algorithmic optimization problems to computationally-demanding weather…

The performances of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are usually evaluated by the metric word error rate (WER) when the manually transcribed data are provided, which are, however, expensively available in the real scenario. In…

Evaluating automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is a classical but difficult and still open problem, which often boils down to focusing only on the word error rate (WER). However, this metric suffers from many limitations and does not…

High-quality automatic speech recognition (ASR) is essential for virtual assistants (VAs) to work well. However, ASR often performs poorly on VA requests containing named entities. In this work, we start from the observation that many ASR…

While various end-to-end models for spoken language understanding tasks have been explored recently, this paper is probably the first known attempt to challenge the very difficult task of end-to-end spoken question answering (SQA). Learning…

To transcribe speech, automatic speech recognition systems use statistical methods, particularly hidden Markov model and N-gram models. Although these techniques perform well and lead to efficient systems, they approach their maximum…

Despite recent advances, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are still far from perfect. Typical errors include acronyms, named entities, and domain-specific special words for which little or no labeled data is available. To address…

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…

Neural sequence-to-sequence systems deliver state-of-the-art performance for automatic speech recognition (ASR). When using appropriate modeling units, e.g., byte-pair encoded characters, these systems are in principal open vocabulary…