The paper introduces an ASCII‑only romanization system that covers all phonemic distinctions in Thai and Lao, including segmental contrasts, vowel length, and lexical tone. It ensures one‑symbol‑one‑phoneme transparency and systematic cross‑lingual correspondence between the two languages, while also aligning with Pinyin and Jyutping where possible. The design prioritizes synchronic phonetic clarity, offers optional historical tone annotations, and results in a readable, keyboard‑friendly, machine‑processable representation useful for language learning and cross‑lingual speech processing.
By Zijie Zhang, Tan Lee
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
The paper evaluates bias in phoneme-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, focusing on WhisperIPA and ZIPA, which produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions. Using multilingual speech corpora and demographically annotated English datasets, the authors compare model-generated IPA against grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) outputs with both standard phoneme error rate (PER) and a new Soft PER metric that allows linguistically similar substitutions. The study finds persistent disparities across language, gender, accent, ethnicity, and age, even when accounting for acceptable phonemic variation.
By Maneesha Rani Saha, Catherine Bao, Neal Patwari
arXiv:2607.18317v5 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We present TTSYoruba, a rule-based concatenative diphone speech synthesizer for Yoruba, deployed at online as part of the YorubaName.com open...
By Kola Tubosun, Adedayo Oluokun, Hafiz Adewuyi, Dadepo Aderemi
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:2609.38627v2 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Yor\`ub\'a is a tonal language in which contour tones pose persistent orthographic challenges. These are especially notable for personal names and lexi...
By K\'ol\'a T\'ub\`os\'un
arXiv:2609. 21362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conventional tokenizers represent text as characters or statistically derived subwords, overlooking the internal phonological structure of syllables and often requiring large vocabularies.
By Nghia Hieu Nguyen, Thai Bao Huynh, Binh-An Dinh-Le, Phu Gia Hoang, Dat Tien Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen, Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen
5-Dialects-BN is a new Bangla dialect benchmark that aligns Romanized transliteration with dialectal text, Standard Bangla, English, and subjectivity labels across five regional varieties. The dataset contains 6,000 manually annotated entries from Chittagong, Barisal, Noakhali, Sylhet, and Rangpur, each enriched with five aligned annotations produced and cross‑validated by native speakers and linguistics students. It supports tasks such as dialect identification, normalization, translation, subjectivity classification, and efficient fine‑tuning of multilingual LLMs.
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:2510.22172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The Continuous Integrate-and-Fire (CIF) mechanism provides effective alignment for non-autoregressive (NAR) speech recognition. This mechanis...
By Ruixiang Mao, Xiangnan Ma, Qing Yang, Ziming Zhu, Yucheng Qiao, Yuan Ge, Tong Xiao, Shengxiang Gao, Zhengtao Yu, Jingbo Zhu
The study evaluates phonologically informed tokenization for German speech recognition using a wav2vec 2.0 backbone fine‑tuned with CTC. Three tokenizer families—pretrained multilingual characters, data‑driven BPE, and phonologically informed units from syllabification and grapheme‑to‑phoneme conversion—are compared across 40 fine‑tunes on three German test sets (in‑domain read, dialectal spontaneous, and standard spontaneous speech). Results show that phonologically informed tokenizers match BPE and character baselines in‑domain, but under domain shift their performance depends on vocabulary size rather than linguistic variation, with syllable‑aware tokenization benefiting dialectal and spontaneous speech at small vocabularies; a phoneme‑level confusion analysis indicates that the acoustic encoder dominates error patterns.
By Christopher Witzl, Tobias Bocklet, Korbinian Riedhammer