The paper introduces a method for measuring accent differences that balances interpretability and practicality. It proposes using articulatory representations obtained via articulatory inversion as an interpretable basis for accent comparison, while employing optimal transport to compare accents across any type of recording. This approach aims to overcome the limitations of traditional phonetic analyses and embedding‑based methods, which are either time‑consuming or non‑interpretable.
By Charles McGhee, Mark J. F. Gales, Kate M. Knill
The paper introduces task-informed parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods for low-resource speech recognition by applying Fisher-Whitened Cross-Covariance Analysis (FCCA) to Whisper and Qwen3-ASR. Two extensions—Asymmetric-Coupled FCCA (AC‑FCCA) and Adaptive‑Rank FCCA (AR‑FCCA)—are proposed to exploit cross‑layer sharing and adapt rank allocation within a fixed parameter budget. Experiments on multilingual datasets show that standard FCCA matches or surpasses LoRA, while AR‑FCCA consistently improves performance across models without increasing trainable parameters.
By Asmee Mishra, Mengjie Qian, Brechtje Post, Kate Knill
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
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:2609.17981v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs), typically built from a pre-trained speech encoder, a modality projector, and an LLM fine-tuned with Low-R...
By Mohan Shi, Zilai Wang, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Kaiyuan Zhang, Eray Eren, Abeer Alwan
arXiv:2610.27002v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Tibetan speech recognition is usually evaluated with character or syllable error rates because the writing system does not mark word boundaries. These...
By Jacob Moore, Sheng Li
Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs), typically built from a pre-trained speech encoder, a modality projector, and an LLM fine-tuned with Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), have shown strong Automatic Sp...
arXiv:2605. 03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability.
By Van-Phat Thai, Aradhya Dhruv, Duc-Thinh Pham, Sameer Alam
arXiv:2601.09050v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Tonal low-resource languages are widely spoken but remain underserved by modern speech technologies. A central challenge is learning speech represe...
By Tianyi Xu, Xuan Ouyang, Binwei Yao, Shoua Xiong, Sara Misurelli, Maichou Lor, Junjie Hu
arXiv:2610.07426v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Accent classifiers are typically trained with a fixed label inventory and cannot accommodate new accent categories as new data becomes available. Mor...
By Mu-Ruei Tseng, Waris Quamer, Ghady Nasrallah, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
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. 29335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal speaker identification systems face two key challenges in real-world deployment: missing modalities and language mismatch between training and testing conditions.
By Chuxiao Zuo, Yao Zhu, Minqiang Xu, Manhong Wang, Yunke Zhang, Fei Huang