The neutral, or floating, tone of Mandarin Chinese is a tone with an enigmatic set of properties. It has been described as a reduced tone, or as a tone that sometimes is lexically fixed but that can also be toneless.
arXiv:2607. 04064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised syllabic tokenization aims to learn discrete syllabic tokens that capture latent linguistic content-related structure from raw speech.
By Ryota Komatsu, Kota Kawakita, Takuma Okamoto, Takahiro Shinozaki
Phonetic forced alignment is a key technique in phonetic research, yet existing alignment systems lack specialized models for low-resource language varieties. We address this by training text-dependent and text-independent aligners for Chengdu Mandarin using a 17-hour corpus and a custom G2P dictionary.
arXiv:2606. 11371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spoken language, whether produced by humans or large language models (LLM), unfolds over time with varying semantic content.
By Han-Jen Chang, Yasir \c{C}atal, Angelika Wolman, Agust\'in Ib\'a\~nez, David Smith, I-Wen Su, Kai-Yuan Cheng, Georg Northoff
Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) have substantially improved speech quality and voice cloning fidelity. However, many zero-shot TTS systems still depend on audio prompt transcripts at inference time.
arXiv:2607. 09020v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Phone segmentation and recognition are inherently related tasks, yet modern approaches typically model them separately.
By Shikhar Bharadwaj, Kwanghee Choi, Stephen McIntosh, Chin-Jou Li, Eunjung Yeo, Daisuke Saito, Nobuaki Minematsu, Shinji Watanabe, Jian Zhu, David Harwath, David R. Mortensen
arXiv:2607. 03928v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accent normalization (AN) seeks to convert non-native (L2) accented speech into standard (L1) speech while preserving speaker identity.
By Qibing Bai, Shuai Wang, Yuhan Du, Bohan Li, Yannan Wang, Haizhou Li
arXiv:2607. 21332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Phonetic forced alignment is a key technique in phonetic research, yet existing alignment systems lack specialized models for low-resource language varieties.
By Zhiheng Qian, Aini Li, Hai Hu, Liang Zhao
arXiv:2606. 17835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study examines the extent to which the wav2vec2.
By James Kirby, Ioana Krehan, Michele Gubian
arXiv:2608. 01281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Phoneme-based multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) can share acoustic evidence across languages more directly than language-specific subword modeling.
By Saierdaer Yusuyin, Nanling Jiang, Hao Huang, Zhijian Ou
arXiv:2607. 08371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic multi-speaker conversations are widely used to train conversational automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, but it remains unclear which timing properties make simulated data most useful.
By M\'at\'e Gedeon, P\'eter Mihajlik
arXiv:2602. 10230v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Audio language models process input audio into rich frame-level representations, but the standard approach to temporal localization generates timestamps as sequences of text tokens, which discards the frame-level representations in favor of autoregressive decoding.
By Joseph An, Phillip Keung, Jiaqi Wang, Orevaoghene Ahia, Noah A. Smith