The paper introduces a method for measuring accent differences that balances interpretability and practicality. It proposes using articulatory representations obtained via articulatory inversion as an interpretable basis for accent comparison, while employing optimal transport to compare accents across any type of recording. This approach aims to overcome the limitations of traditional phonetic analyses and embedding‑based methods, which are either time‑consuming or non‑interpretable.
By Charles McGhee, Mark J. F. Gales, Kate M. Knill
arXiv:2606. 17826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in non-English clinical settings is challenged by multiscript variability, where the same term may appear in multiple valid orthographic forms.
By Jean Seo, Minkyu Kim, Jeonguk Lee, Jisoo Jung, Wooseok Han, Eunho Yang
Neural TTS systems can sound natural across languages, but naturalness does not guarantee the preservation of sound contrasts that distinguish words from their grammatical forms. Standard metrics like MOS do not test for this.
arXiv:2605. 20712v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automatic speech recognition replaces typing only when correction costs less than manual entry - a threshold determined by error types, not counts: fixing a misrecognized domain term costs far more than inserting a comma.
By Kavya Manohar, Arghya Bhattacharya, Kush Juvekar, Kumarmanas Nethil
arXiv:2607. 01965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural TTS systems can sound natural across languages, but naturalness does not guarantee the preservation of sound contrasts that distinguish words from their grammatical forms.
By Sneha Ray Barman, Neeraj Kumar Sharma, Shakuntala Mahanta
The paper evaluates a multilingual ASR model (MMS‑1B‑all) on a Garrusi Kurdish dataset using a common‑reference staged normalization approach. By normalizing both reference and hypothesis, the authors show that raw Arabic‑script hypotheses yield a 111.70 % WER, which drops to 97.85 % after folding into a reduced orthography, highlighting the impact of orthographic differences on error measurement. A Southern Kurdish fine‑tuned system performs worse, and residual errors are partly due to scoring‑pipeline limitations rather than recognition failures.
By Hiwa Asadpour
The paper presents a fully self‑supervised contrastive learning framework that learns lexical representations from raw IPA‑transcribed wordlists without any cognacy annotations or expert input. Using a dual contrastive objective—word‑level and language‑level losses—the model produces word representations that enable fast computation of pairwise language distances and the inference of a global phylogenetic tree for 3,399 language varieties. The resulting tree achieves a generalized quartet distance competitive with baselines while requiring only minutes of computation on a standard notebook GPU, and the representations also capture diachronic concept stability.
By Tim Wientzek
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
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
The paper introduces a compact BART-based sequence‑to‑sequence model for low‑latency spell correction of Japanese music search queries, addressing challenges posed by four writing scripts. It employs a script‑aware synthetic misspelling pipeline that blends keyboard‑layout models, phonetic confusion priors, consonant alternations, and kana case errors, and normalizes mixed‑script titles to a single canonical script to reduce hallucinations. Experiments show the model achieves 41.09% exact‑match accuracy and 11.62% CER, outperforming edit‑distance baselines while keeping inference latency under 4 ms on a single GPU.
By Anshul Garg, Pavni Tandon, Karan Bhukar, Tanmay Khandelwal, Ujjal Kumar Dutta
The paper introduces a unified phoneme‑based TTS‑to‑ASR augmentation pipeline that uses a multilingual TTS model with language‑ID conditioning and incorporates grapheme‑to‑phoneme conversion, reference‑speech filtering, and candidate‑text selection. It proposes phoneme‑frequency‑guided selection (PFGS) to rank sentences based on phoneme frequencies from real ASR labels, and demonstrates that random augmentation and PFGS both improve ASR performance across Arabic, French, Italian, and Portuguese test sets, with PFGS yielding up to a 19.3% relative WER reduction. The study also shows that filtering reference speech can further lower WER by up to 0.59 points on certain datasets.
By Zhen Wang, TianRui Wu, RongQi Han, Hao Wu, Wei Liang
arXiv:2608.29170v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This paper proposes the Sinitic Romanization Ecosystem, a cross-lingual Sinitic romanization design framework with supporting digital infrastructure an...
By Zijie Zhang, Tan Lee, Yong Cao, Benyou Wang