arXiv AI

Phonetic forced alignment for low-resource language varieties: Model training and evaluation on Chengdu Mandarin

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Phoneme- and Word-Level Metrics Using Self-Supervised Speech Representations for Forced Alignment Evaluation

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 Computation and Language
Sep 21

Transsion's Speaker-Attributed Multilingual ASR System for the MLC-SLM 2026 Challenge

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 AI
Sep 24

Phonemizing User-Generated Text: A Benchmark, Taxonomy, and Compositional Approach

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