arXiv AI

Ruby-ASR: Evidence-Preserving Supervision for Joint Orthographic and Lexical-Reading Recognition

Ruby-ASR introduces an evidence-preserving supervision method for Japanese automatic speech recognition that refines the conventional orthographic target into a span-bound orthographic–lexical-reading sequence. This ruby representation locally binds each written span to its spoken reading, enabling deterministic recovery of both orthographic and lexical views. Experiments on five Japanese benchmarks show that this refined target improves lexical-reading recovery while maintaining readable orthographic transcription.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Training-Free Pronunciation Transcription via Text-Constrained Acoustic Rescoring

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 Computation and Language
Sep 21

Beyond Atomic Tokens: Factorizing Syllables for Language Model Pretraining

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 Computation and Language
Sep 4

Dual-Form ASR: Semantics-Aware Inverse Text Normalization for Chinese Speech Recognition

Dual-Form ASR (DF-ASR) is a framework that unifies spoken-form ASR and semantics-aware written-form inverse text normalization (ITN) for Chinese speech recognition. It uses paired spoken- and written-form supervision generated and judged by a large language model, and introduces an ITN-MWER objective to penalize errors on normalization-sensitive spans. DF-ASR also employs a REQUIRE-ITN/FORBID-ITN protocol to separately evaluate required normalization and forbidden-span preservation, achieving superior performance over open-source ASR-ITN systems while maintaining prompt-level control between transcript forms.

By Fengrun Zhang, Li Fu, Wangjin Zhou, Lu Fan, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He
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
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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Dynamic Lagging using Stable-Prefix Training for Simultaneous Translation

The paper introduces a training strategy for cascaded simultaneous speech translation that allows the system to dynamically decide how much of the source prefix to translate. By fine‑tuning a large language model (Qwen3‑8B) on stable prefixes—pairs of source prefixes and the longest shared translation with the full sentence—the authors enable contextual read‑write decisions beyond fixed wait‑k or target‑suffix deletion. Experiments on English‑to‑German, Japanese, and Chinese demonstrate that stable prefixes improve the quality‑latency tradeoff across various test sets.

By Hieu Hoang, Amittai Axelrod, Matt Post
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
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 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