arXiv Computation and Language

Prosody-to-Text: Predicting text from low-pass filtered speech

The paper explores the reverse of the common prosody-from-text task by predicting text from low‑frequency speech features. Using a Whisper model fine‑tuned on only the 12 lowest Mel bins (≈450 Hz cutoff), the authors achieve a word error rate of 36 %, with 10 % of utterances perfectly recovered and 40 % below 25 % WER. They also report that, given the correct prefix, the next token is predicted correctly 79 % of the time, indicating a stronger link between low‑frequency prosody and lexical content than previously assumed.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

Hear2Act: Benchmarking When Prosody Should Change What an Assistant Does

Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged. Yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate prosodic perception, response appropriateness, and task-oriented dialogue in isolation, making it difficult to test whether prosodic evidence changes downstream decisions.

arXiv AI
Sep 1

Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure

arXiv:2608.30260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While it is well-established that prosody carries crucial cues for syntactic structure, the degree and nature of correspondence between these two dom...

By Junghyun Min, Alex Warstadt, Tamar I. Regev, Tiago Pimentel, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Beyond Naturalness: Probing Automated Text-To-Speech Evaluators on Linguistically Grounded Dimensions

arXiv:2608. 09930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation methods (Mean Opinion Score (MOS) predictors and Audio Large Language Models (Audio-LLM) judges) are expected to reflect human perception, yet it is unclear how well they capture the distinct aspects of speech that listeners actually perceive.

By Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Simon Rosen, Jash Shah, Lindsay Devon Brin, Hoang H Nguyen, Anke Koelzer, Rachel Hansen, Tara Bogavelli, Fanny Riols
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

SPAR-K: Scheduled Periodic Alternating Early Exit for Spoken Language Models

SPAR-K is a scheduled periodic alternating early‑exit framework for interleaved spoken language models that reduces decoding depth for speech tokens while maintaining quality. It lets most speech positions exit at a fixed intermediate layer and inserts periodic full‑depth refresh steps to counter distribution shift. Experiments on Step‑Audio‑2‑mini and GLM‑4‑Voice show up to 11 % depth reduction with less than 0.82 % drop in question‑answering accuracy and negligible impact on MOS and WER.

By Hsiao-Ying Huang, Cheng-Han Chiang, Hung-yi Lee
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Is Prosody Lost in Translation? Fine-Grained Cross-Lingual Prosody Similarity Across Languages

This paper investigates whether prosodic features—pitch, energy, and timing—are preserved when speech is translated between languages. Using multilingual dubbing data for English‑German, English‑Spanish, and English‑French pairs, the authors conduct a fine‑grained cross‑lingual analysis to quantify similarities and differences in prosody. The study identifies inherent cross‑lingual correlations in prosodic structure and explores how linguistic and alignment factors influence these patterns.

By Haopeng Xie, Ismail Rasim Ulgen, Sofia Son, Berrak Sisman, Philipp Koehn
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Heard but Not Heeded: Paralinguistic Information Encoding and Loss in Audio-Language Models

The paper investigates whether audio‑language models capture paralinguistic cues beyond spoken content. Using the Expresso dataset and four open‑source models, the authors trace how speaking style information is encoded in the late layers of the audio encoder but is degraded before reaching the final output. They find that some models are content‑driven while others are acoustic‑driven, revealing a gap between what is encoded and what is utilized in current audio‑language models.

By Bhuvan Koduru, Dareen Safar B Alharthi, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj