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.
The paper introduces two new corpus‑level, reference‑free metrics—Phoneme‑Cluster Mutual Information (PCMI) and Word Acoustic Consistency Score (WACS)—that use self‑supervised speech representations to evaluate forced alignment quality. PCMI quantifies how well aligned phoneme labels agree with clusters derived from SSL representations, while WACS assesses consistency across repeated word realizations via dynamic time warping of word representation sequences. Experiments on 85 languages from FLEURS and 45 languages in DoReCo show that both metrics degrade predictably under alignment perturbations, effectively distinguish high‑ from low‑quality alignments, and correlate strongly with traditional timestamp‑based measures, enabling scalable, multilingual alignment evaluation without manual annotations.
By V. S. D. S. Mahesh Akavarapu, Michael Daniel, Gerhard J\"ager
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
arXiv:2602.19574v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large-language-model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems can generate natural speech, but most are not designed for low-latency dual-str...
By Hanwen Liu, Saierdaer Yusuyin, Hao Huang, Zhijian Ou
arXiv:2609.13615v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: For our submission to the WMT26 Creole Language Translation Shared Task, we focus on machine translation (MT) models for Pacific creoles: Tok Pisin, Bi...
By Rapha\"el Merx, Nick Thieberger, Ekaterina Vylomova
Text-to-speech systems increasingly process user-generated text (UGT) such as ppl and imo, whose pronunciation must be inferred from the canonical rather than surface form. We introduce UGTPhon, the f...
The paper describes Transsion Speech Team’s submission to Task 1 of the MLC‑SLM 2026 Challenge, aiming at speaker‑attributed transcription for multilingual conversational speech. Their cascaded framework includes a DiariZen‑based speaker diarization module, a Qwen3‑Omni‑based long‑form multilingual ASR module with CTC alignment for precise timestamps, and a fusion module that merges diarization and transcription outputs into speaker‑attributed STM results. On the official evaluation set, the system achieved a tcpMER of 15.41% and secured second place among all participants.
By Zhecheng Ren, Xuanji He, Xiaoxiao Li, Zhichen Han, Gaoyang Dong, Gaosheng Zhang, Minchuan Chen, Fengjie Zhu
arXiv:2607. 06831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-to-text alignment means finding the temporal boundaries of each word in the audio.
By Albert Zeyer, Ralf Schl\"uter, Hermann Ney
The paper introduces UGTPhon, a grapheme-to-phoneme benchmark for user‑generated text in English, Vietnamese, and Korean, and presents a taxonomy for diagnosing pronunciation errors. It shows that existing G2P models and large language models struggle with canonical‑to‑non‑canonical text, with errors up to 66.8 PER points. A compositional G2P approach that uses exact‑match lookup and staged decoding reduces these errors and performs competitively with larger few‑shot LLMs.
By MinJu Jeon, Younghan Park, Han Sung Park, Jong-Hwan Kim, Dong-Jin Kim, Hoyeon Lee
arXiv:2609.23191v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speech-text space alignment is a multimodal representation learning method consisting to map different speech and text into a shared representation spa...
By Yannick Yomie Nzeuhang, Marie Tahon, Paulin Melatagia Yonta
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.
arXiv:2610.00825v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Dubbing quality control requires a reference-free judge that can determine whether a candidate text line matches a speaker's visible articulation in bo...
By Rui Liu, Bhavin Jawade, Haoqi Li, Shivam Mehta, Karan Saxena, Yinghong Lan, Cameron R. Wolfe