arXiv:2606. 06740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete speech units obtained via k-means clustering of self supervised embeddings entangle phonetic, speaker, and language information, causing speaker mixing and cross-lingual interference in multilingual multi-speaker speech generation.
arXiv:2606. 26144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speaker diarization, the task of determining "who spoke when" in a multi-speaker recording, is a critical component in applications such as meeting transcription, accessibility tools, and multilingual information retrieval.
The paper presents BiMamba2, a 47.88‑million‑parameter bidirectional Mamba‑2 encoder trained with masked discrete‑unit prediction for multilingual speech representation. It was trained on 250 hours of unlabeled speech from 67 languages and evaluated in the Unsupervised Speech in the Wild Challenge, achieving an Adjusted Rand Index of 0.735 for speaker clustering while reporting lower performance on language identification and character error rate compared to supervised baselines. The authors also discuss a discrepancy between local‑official metric scales and checkpoint rankings, underscoring the limits of in‑distribution diagnostics for predicting Dynabench probe outcomes.
arXiv:2609.38887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time voice conversion (VC) systems commonly rely on pretrained speaker embeddings from automatic speaker verification (ASV) models. While effect...
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:2607. 23808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce Indic DiarBench, a speaker diarization and ASR benchmark dataset spanning all 22 scheduled languages of India.
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.
arXiv:2609.28060v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-supervised speech models encode rich phonetic information, but it remains unclear how to transform this information into interpretable metrics for...
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.
arXiv:2606. 17416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual speaker verification remains challenging because language-dependent acoustic variability causes speaker identity to become entangled with linguistic characteristics, degrading generalization across languages.
The paper introduces a native-reference phone‑class geometry that measures second‑language pronunciation deviation without needing pronunciation labels, read‑aloud prompts, or matched native recordings. By averaging self‑supervised representations for each phone‑class in a native speech corpus and applying singular value decomposition, the authors create a compact coordinate system. Projecting L2 utterances into this space, they find that distances to native coordinates correlate negatively with holistic speaking proficiency and pronunciation quality, indicating the geometry captures relevant acoustic‑phonetic information for spontaneous L2 speech.
arXiv:2609.24275v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-speech (TTS) corpora are costly to record, yet many utterances add little new phonetic information. Core-set selection reduces this cost by cho...
arXiv:2509. 15001v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Child-centered daylong recordings are essential for studying early language development, but existing speech models trained on clean adult data perform poorly due to acoustic and linguistic differences.