arXiv Computation and Language

ToneCL: Contrastive Learning for Few-Shot Syllable-Level Tone Classification

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 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
Sep 17

T-SANDHI: Tone Sandhi-aware Adaptive Network with Decoupled Hybrid Injection for Low-resource Taiwanese Hokkien Speech Recognition

T‑SANDHI is a lightweight Taiwanese Hokkien ASR model that addresses tone sandhi by decoupling surface acoustics from lexical intent on a frozen Whisper backbone. It uses a lexicon‑guided multi‑task learning framework with text‑derived pseudo labels and a hybrid injection module that dynamically gates independent citation and sandhi phonetic streams. Experiments on the TAT‑MOE corpus and two blind test sets show that this explicit disentanglement resolves tonal mapping confusion and outperforms baselines while keeping parameter usage low.

By Hung-Yang Sung, Chien-Chun Wang, Tien-Hong Lo, Yu-Sheng Tsao, Yung-Chang Hsu, Berlin Chen
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