arXiv Machine Learning

Latent Softmax for Data-Efficient Phoneme-Based Multilingual ASR Across Tonal and Non-Tonal Languages

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.

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 Machine Learning
Jul 14

An Empirical Recipe for Universal Phone Recognition

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
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
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Multi-Task Learning for Non-Canonical Phoneme Recognition via Articulatory Feature Decomposition

The paper proposes a linguistically structured multi‑task learning framework for recognizing non‑canonical phonemes by decomposing phoneme prediction into articulatory feature dimensions such as manner, place, and voicing. A hierarchical architecture with task‑specific heads and a cross‑attention fusion module is combined with semi‑supervised Momentum Pseudo‑Labeling and a cascaded training strategy that gradually introduces articulatory tasks. Experiments on the L2‑ARCTIC dataset demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models and produce interpretable error patterns aligned with phonological feature structure.

By Sophia Riaz, Haoze Zheng, Amos Roche, Miyu Zhang, Anamika Ragu, Salvatore Penachio, Kaustav Mukherjee, Aneesh Jonelagadda