The study evaluates how different input representations—orthographic text, IPA transcription, and romanization—affect cross‑lingual transfer in autoregressive multilingual language models. Across three model sizes and eight languages grouped into typologically motivated pairs, romanized pretraining consistently outperforms native orthography and IPA, especially as model scale increases. Fine‑tuning a text‑pretrained model on romanized data can harm performance on languages already covered by the base model, suggesting romanization should be integrated at pretraining rather than applied later.
By Muge Zhang, Aaron Jencks, Krishna Badikela, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sachin Kumar
arXiv:2609.09554v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. L...
By Shivam Singh, Aditya Yadavalli, Catherine Arnett, Alex Warstadt
arXiv:2609.09964v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their capabilities degrade sharply f...
By Md Mahir Jawad, Galib Mahmud Jim, Rafid Ahmed, Mir Sazzat Hossain, Md Fahim, Md Farhad Alam Bhuiyan
arXiv:2607. 21332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Phonetic forced alignment is a key technique in phonetic research, yet existing alignment systems lack specialized models for low-resource language varieties.
By Zhiheng Qian, Aini Li, Hai Hu, Liang Zhao
While large language model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have achieved high-quality speech synthesis, most existing systems focus on English and Chinese. Japanese, however, remains under-explored, and its unique linguistic challenges, such as widespread context-dependent kanji polyphony, have yet to be adequately tackled.
arXiv:2605. 19266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are typically optimized for verbatim transcription, which preserves disfluencies, filler words, and informal spoken structures that are often unsuitable for downstream writing-oriented applications.
By Wanyi Ning, Yinshang Guo, Haitao Qian, Jiyuan Cheng, Weiyuan Feng, Yufei Zhang
arXiv:2606. 30790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Romanized Code Mixing (RCM), where bilingual speakers fluidly blend local languages with English in Roman script, has emerged as the dominant form of communication across multilingual communities.
By Avisha Das, Mihir Parmar, Mohana Ramnath, Pulkit Verma
arXiv:2606. 24169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adapting a streaming speech recognition model to a new language requires choosing between two plausible warm starts: a multilingual (ML) encoder or an English-only (EN) encoder.
By Nenad Banfic
Phonetic forced alignment is a key technique in phonetic research, yet existing alignment systems lack specialized models for low-resource language varieties. We address this by training text-dependent and text-independent aligners for Chengdu Mandarin using a 17-hour corpus and a custom G2P dictionary.
arXiv:2603. 29042v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Phone recognition (PR) is a key enabler of multilingual and low-resource speech processing tasks, yet robust performance remains elusive.
By Shikhar Bharadwaj, Chin-Jou Li, Kwanghee Choi, Eunjung Yeo, William Chen, Shinji Watanabe, David R. Mortensen
We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. Large end-to-end Transformer-based ASR models such...
Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) have substantially improved speech quality and voice cloning fidelity. However, many zero-shot TTS systems still depend on audio prompt transcripts at inference time.