The paper introduces an ASCII‑only romanization system that covers all phonemic distinctions in Thai and Lao, including segmental contrasts, vowel length, and lexical tone. It ensures one‑symbol‑one‑phoneme transparency and systematic cross‑lingual correspondence between the two languages, while also aligning with Pinyin and Jyutping where possible. The design prioritizes synchronic phonetic clarity, offers optional historical tone annotations, and results in a readable, keyboard‑friendly, machine‑processable representation useful for language learning and cross‑lingual speech processing.
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...
The paper introduces Tha, a Khmer text normalization and inverse text normalization toolkit that uses weighted finite-state transducers. Tha processes entire lines in a single shortest-path search and employs a second transducer to prevent token boundaries within Khmer syllables. On Google's Khmer test suite, Tha achieves perfect agreement on 274 cardinals and correctly rewrites 153 of 158 real TTS prompts.
The paper evaluates bias in phoneme-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, focusing on WhisperIPA and ZIPA, which produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions. Using multilingual speech corpora and demographically annotated English datasets, the authors compare model-generated IPA against grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) outputs with both standard phoneme error rate (PER) and a new Soft PER metric that allows linguistically similar substitutions. The study finds persistent disparities across language, gender, accent, ethnicity, and age, even when accounting for acceptable phonemic variation.
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.
arXiv:2609. 21362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conventional tokenizers represent text as characters or statistically derived subwords, overlooking the internal phonological structure of syllables and often requiring large vocabularies.
The paper introduces a new evaluation framework for phonetic encoding algorithms, using a generalized Rand Index called the Hüllermeier‑Rifqi Index. It measures discordance by comparing pairwise similarity scores of ground‑truth IPA transcriptions with those of encoded strings, adjusted against a random generator. The method is applied to multilingual datasets, assessing recall via collision rate and demonstrating its use in evaluating orthographic transparency.
arXiv:2609.38627v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: Yor\`ub\'a is a tonal language in which contour tones pose persistent orthographic challenges. These are especially notable for personal names and lexi...
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.
arXiv:2609.38627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Yor\`ub\'a is a tonal language in which contour tones pose persistent orthographic challenges. These are especially notable for personal names and lexi...
arXiv:2608. 07917v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chinese historical documents preserve valuable cultural heritage, but many collections remain accessible only as scanned page images, preventing full-text retrieval, collation, and computational analysis.
arXiv:2607. 23808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce Indic DiarBench, a speaker diarization and ASR benchmark dataset spanning all 22 scheduled languages of India.
arXiv:2608. 07917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chinese historical documents preserve valuable cultural heritage, but many collections remain accessible only as scanned page images, preventing full-text retrieval, collation, and computational analysis.