arXiv Computation and Language

Long-Tail Rebalancing for Non-Verbal Vocalization-Aware ASR: A Track~1 System for the NVVSpeech Challenge

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Long-Tail Rebalancing for Non-Verbal Vocalization-Aware ASR: A Track 1 System for the NVVSpeech Challenge

The paper presents a data‑centric approach to improve automatic speech recognition for non‑verbal vocalizations (NVVs) in the ISCSLP NVVSpeech Challenge. It introduces cross‑dataset label harmonization and a two‑stage sampling schedule—first square‑root category sampling to address long‑tailed distributions, then uniform‑category fine‑tuning—to jointly transcribe lexical content and 16 NVV categories. The final system achieved an official score of 63.86, ranking fourth in Track 1.

By Shangyue Jia, Jingru Ma, Yangzhuo Li, Daoping Luo, Bowen Tian, Hanchen Lu, Wenze Ren, Yunxiang Chen, Houdun Liu, Su Feng, Lei Xie, Liumeng Xue
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 2

Efficient ASR Training with Conversations that Never Happened

Conversational ASR for lower-resource languages and niche domains is limited by the scarcity of domain-matched multi-speaker training data. We propose an augmentation pipeline that generates scenario-level dialogues with participant metadata, maps speaker attributes to TTS voice profiles, and assembles synthesized utterances into speaker-aware simulated conversations.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Language Family Matters: Evaluating LLM-Based ASR Across Linguistic Boundaries

The paper introduces a new strategy for connecting large language models (LLMs) to speech encoders in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by sharing a single connector across languages within the same linguistic family. This approach reduces the number of parameters needed compared to training a separate connector for each language, while improving generalization across different domains and real‑world corpora. Experiments with two multilingual LLMs and two speech datasets demonstrate that family‑based connectors are both efficient and effective for multilingual ASR deployment.

By Yuchen Zhang, Ravi Shekhar, Haralambos Mouratidis
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

A Training Criterion with Token-Level Tolerance to Transcription Ambiguity for Automatic Speech Recognition

The paper introduces a token‑level extension of Omni‑Temporal Classification (OTC) for automatic speech recognition, allowing unsupported tokens to be bypassed while preserving supervision for the rest of the word. Across 19 languages and three corpora, this token‑level OTC consistently outperforms standard CTC, achieving the lowest mean word error rate on every dataset and a 9.45% average relative WER reduction. A predictive‑entropy‑indexed schedule replaces epoch‑based relaxation, reducing training‑length dependence while maintaining performance.

By Saurabh Kumar, Diptiman Mohanta, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Phoneme-guided TTS augmentation for ASR: A unified pipeline and multilingual evaluation

The paper introduces a phoneme-guided text-to-speech (TTS) augmentation pipeline for automatic speech recognition (ASR) that links multilingual speech generation with candidate-text selection and reference-speech quality control. It proposes phoneme-frequency-guided selection (PFGS), which prioritizes candidate texts containing common phonetic content based on real ASR training transcripts. Experiments across four languages and 13 test sets show that random text selection improves recognition on 11 test sets, while PFGS further improves nine test sets with relative word error rate reductions up to 19.3%, and reference-speech filtering also contributes to performance gains.

By Zhen Wang, TianRui Wu, RongQi Han, Hao Wu, Wei Liang, Wei Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Scaling phoneme-based TTS augmentation for ASR: A unified pipeline and controlled study

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 Computation and Language
Sep 28

Inference-Time Target Speaker Unlearning in LLM-Based Automatic Speech Recognition

The paper introduces a new target‑speaker unlearning task for automatic speech recognition (TSU‑ASR) that allows certain speakers to opt out of transcription while still indicating their presence. A lightweight Enrollment‑Conditioned Gating (ECG) module is added to a frozen dual‑stream speech LLM, enabling dynamic unlearning of new opt‑out speakers during inference. Experiments on AMI and AliMeeting datasets show significant drops in transcription accuracy for opt‑out speakers while preserving performance for retained speakers.

By Bo Su, Yueru Yan, Thai Le