arXiv Computation and Language

Towards Stress-Aware Sentence-Level Filipino G2P With Weakly-Supervised ByT5 Fine-Tuning

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 Computation and Language
Sep 4

Contextual Tamil Spelling and Grammar Correction Using Progressively Fine-Tuned Sequence-to-Sequence Transformers

The paper presents an end‑to‑end sequence‑to‑sequence approach for correcting Tamil spelling and grammar errors, leveraging progressively fine‑tuned transformer models (mT5‑small and mBART‑50). Using a synthetic corpus of 657,720 noisy‑clean sentence pairs across ten error categories, the authors introduce a four‑stage training schedule that targets surface noise, contextual grammar, single‑site sandhi, and multi‑site cross‑word sandhi. The best model, mBART‑50 v5, achieves 69.3% exact‑match accuracy on a balanced diagnostic set, with notable gains in sandhi (87.5%) and subject‑verb agreement (43.5%) accuracy, while also revealing a precision‑recall trade‑off for sandhi corrections.

By Karthikeyan A, Jaya Nirmala S, Sangeetha Sivanesan, Indhu R, Pranav Kumar, Bharat Jude Johnson, Vishnu Ram
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Manac\'a-1B: An Open, Reproducible Brazilian-Portuguese Language Model and a Tokenizer-Aware, Paired Evaluation

Manacá-1B is a 1.72‑billion‑parameter, open decoder‑only language model trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese, released with a fully containerized, reproducible training pipeline and complete logs. The authors evaluate it against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks, reporting standard errors and paired significance tests, and find that Manacá-1B outperforms smaller models on LAMBADA‑PT while remaining competitive on commonsense completion. They also uncover a tokenizer‑related evaluation pitfall that can drastically lower accuracy and provide a simple fix, releasing all code, logs, and corrected tokenizer for full reproducibility.

By Bruno Leonardo Santos Menezes, Carlos Leonardo Souza Cardoso, Fabio Andre Machado Porto
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Complex-Text Robustness Evaluation and Failure Diagnosis for Low-Resource Multilingual Text-to-Speech

The paper introduces a framework to evaluate and diagnose the robustness of low‑resource multilingual text‑to‑speech systems when faced with complex text inputs such as numbers, dates, named entities, long sentences, code‑switched expressions, and punctuation structures. It assesses robustness across content consistency, language consistency, and generation stability, and proposes automatic metrics (character error rate, language ID accuracy, duration abnormal rate) along with a lightweight Text Risk Score (TRS) that predicts synthesis risk from interpretable text features. Experiments on Thai, Vietnamese, Swahili, and Indonesian TTS systems reveal distinct failure patterns and show that TRS correlates positively with content and duration errors, offering a low‑cost pre‑synthesis risk indicator.

By Tianlun Zuo, Ziyu Zhang, Tingzhi Mao, Zhonghua Fu, Lei Xie
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

M-GATE: Multilingual Grammar, Accuracy in Translation, and Efficiency Benchmark for Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.

By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y