arXiv AI

HuPER: A Human-Inspired Framework for Phonetic Perception

HuPER is a human-inspired framework that models phonetic perception as adaptive inference over acoustic‑phonetics evidence and linguistic knowledge. Using only 100 hours of training data, it achieves state‑of‑the‑art phonetic error rates on five English benchmarks and demonstrates strong zero‑shot transfer to 95 unseen languages. It uniquely enables adaptive, multi‑path phonetic perception across diverse acoustic conditions, and all training data, models, and code are open‑sourced.

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 AI
Aug 20

Aslema at NADI 2026: Augmentation through Fewshot for SLU

Aslema is a system developed for the NADI 2026 Shared Task 5, which involves intent recognition and slot filling. The team evaluated four omni LLMs in a zero‑shot setting and found that fine‑tuned models consistently outperform zero‑shot inference. They further improved performance by augmenting data with culturally grounded Tunisian Derja utterances generated by an LLM and synthetic speech produced via voice cloning, achieving top‑ranked results on the official test set.

By Tajwaar Shafiq, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam