The paper introduces a context‑aware neural grapheme‑to‑phoneme (G2P) system for unsegmented languages like Japanese, combining a discriminative conditional random field over a dictionary‑based word lattice with large language model‑generated training data. By generating over two million synthetic sentences, the method addresses data scarcity and achieves superior performance compared to traditional morphological analyzers and neural sequence models. On the Joyo‑Kanji‑Yomi benchmark, it attains 99.62% target word reading accuracy, 0.32% target word phoneme error rate, and 0.14% sentence phoneme error rate.
The paper introduces a training‑free speech‑and‑text‑to‑pronunciation (ST2P) pipeline that combines lexical candidates from G2P tools with acoustic rescoring using frozen pretrained S2P models. By performing a left‑to‑right greedy search over whole‑sequence negative log‑likelihoods, the method achieves a dramatic reduction in character error rate on Japanese corpora, outperforming both baseline G2P/S2P approaches and commercial multimodal LLMs. The approach is also significantly faster—3–3.5× faster than beam search and twice as fast as direct decoding—while maintaining high accuracy across multiple languages.
By Hikaru Asano, Yotaro Kubo, So Kuroki
arXiv:2603.29217v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Phoneme-based ASR factorizes recognition into speech-to-phoneme (S2P) and phoneme-to-grapheme (P2G), enabling cross-lingual acoustic sharing...
By Lukuan Dong, Ziwei Li, Saierdaer Yusuyin, Xianyu Zhao, Zhijian Ou
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 introduces phoneme‑guided initialization for large language model‑based speech recognition. By pre‑training an audio encoder on speech‑to‑phoneme conversion and an LLM on phoneme‑to‑grapheme conversion, then fine‑tuning jointly on ASR, the method leverages phoneme‑mediated processing within an end‑to‑end framework. Experiments on Japanese, Chinese, Tatar, and Urdu demonstrate that this approach matches or surpasses both cascaded S2P‑P2G baselines and end‑to‑end models without phoneme initialization.
By Ryo Magoshi, Shinsuke Sakai, Tatsuya Kawahara
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
DiscoPhon is a multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate unsupervised phoneme discovery from discrete speech units. It includes 6 development and 6 test languages that cover a wide range of phonemic contrasts, and requires systems to generate discrete units mapped to a predefined phoneme inventory using only 10 hours of speech from an unseen language. The benchmark assesses unit quality, recognition, and segmentation, and provides four pretrained multilingual HuBERT and SpidR baselines that demonstrate current models can produce units that correlate well with phonemes, though performance varies across languages.
By Maxime Poli, Manel Khentout, Angelo Ortiz Tandazo, Ewan Dunbar, Emmanuel Chemla, Emmanuel Dupoux
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.
By Nghia Hieu Nguyen, Thai Bao Huynh, Binh-An Dinh-Le, Phu Gia Hoang, Dat Tien Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen, Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen
arXiv:2606. 09234v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-speech (TTS) systems typically adopt a cascaded pipeline consisting of a speech tokenizer, an autoregressive large language model (LLM), and a diffusion based flow-matching (FM) model, with these components trained independently.
By Changfeng Gao, Yong Ren, Jun Yuan, Ye Bai, Zhao You, ShiDong Shang
The paper proposes a modular tokenizer framework for multilingual large language models, allowing the creation of language‑specific subtokenizers that match monolingual compression quality. It introduces a pretraining strategy that samples these subtokenizers to limit predictions to relevant vocabularies, enabling efficient training and inference. This approach reduces memory usage and speeds up inference without compromising performance.
By Franck Signe, Hippolyte Pilchen, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon, \'Edouard Grave
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally rely on a single vocabulary shared by all supported languages, which can lead to uneven compression across them. Moreover, their large embedding...
While large language model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have achieved high-quality speech synthesis, most existing systems focus on English and Chinese. Japanese, however, remains under-explored, and its unique linguistic challenges, such as widespread context-dependent kanji polyphony, have yet to be adequately tackled.