arXiv Computation and Language

DiscoPhon: Benchmarking the Unsupervised Discovery of Phoneme Inventories With Discrete Speech Units

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

An Empirical Recipe for Universal Phone Recognition

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.

By Shikhar Bharadwaj, Chin-Jou Li, Kwanghee Choi, Eunjung Yeo, William Chen, Shinji Watanabe, David R. Mortensen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Dictionary-Constrained Grapheme-to-Phoneme for Unsegmented Languages from LLM-Annotated Data

The paper introduces a context‑aware neural grapheme‑to‑phoneme (G2P) system for unsegmented languages like Japanese, using a discriminative conditional random field over a word lattice built from dictionaries. It addresses data scarcity by generating over two million sentences with large language models. Experiments show the method surpasses traditional morphological analyzers and neural sequence models, achieving 99.62% target word reading accuracy and very low phoneme error rates on the Joyo‑Kanji‑Yomi benchmark.

By Rui Hu, Zhenpeng Zhan, Xiaolong Lin
arXiv AI
6d ago

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
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 18

Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Models

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.

By Maneesha Rani Saha, Catherine Bao, Neal Patwari
arXiv AI
Jun 17

findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding

arXiv:2603. 26292v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Syllable-level units offer compact and linguistically meaningful representations for spoken language modeling and unsupervised word discovery, but research on syllabification remains fragmented across disparate implementations, datasets, and evaluation protocols.

By H\'ector Javier V\'azquez Mart\'inez
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

Dictionary-Constrained Grapheme-to-Phoneme for Unsegmented Languages from LLM-Annotated Data

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.