The article reviews a recent Kurdish speech resource release that includes three voices, 35 hours of recorded speech, and a supporting paper. It finds several issues with the public files—mislisted equipment, unlabeled test data, and a coding error—while noting that the download page overstates the results and recommends a single voice for general use. The authors argue that these problems can largely be corrected with existing information, improving the resource’s usability for future work.
By Hiwa Asadpour
arXiv:2607. 08256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Best-of-$N$ (BoN) inference improves content consistency in zero-shot text-to-speech by selecting from $N$ candidates with an automatic speech recognition (ASR) verifier.
By Taehyung Yu, Seongjae Kang
arXiv:2608.22316v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Whether an intermediate stage of modern Arabic handwriting helps or hurts historical Arabic HTR is usually decided from one implementation and one co...
By Sumaih Almarshad, Maram Alamri, Dona Aloraini, Fares Altuwaim, AlJawharh AlOtaibi, Reem Alyabis, Rayah Aldawsari
arXiv:2606. 18717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turkish is agglutinative: meaning is carried by morphemes, yet the subword tokenizers that drive modern language models split words by corpus statistics, fragmenting semantically loaded suffixes and -- in the case of WordPiece and rule-based analyzers -- failing to decode their output back to the original text.
By Tolga \c{S}akar
The study evaluates seven parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning (PEFT) methods—LoRA, QLoRA, AdaLoRA, DoRA, LoHA, VeRA, and VB‑LoRA—on two ASR back‑ends (Whisper‑large‑v3 and Qwen3‑ASR‑1.7B) for a single post‑stroke Hungarian male speaker with severe dysarthria. Attention‑projection adapters consistently lower character error rates (CER) on both models, with LoRA emerging as the simplest and most effective choice; QLoRA performs worse and offers no memory advantage at this scale. Full fine‑tuning yields the lowest CER, but a 115 MB LoRA that also adapts feed‑forward blocks achieves comparable accuracy with only 3.7 % of the per‑patient storage, and a 5‑minute enrollment audio captures nearly half of the zero‑shot‑to‑30‑minute CER improvement.
whyItMatters":"The paper demonstrates that lightweight PEFT adapters can substantially improve dysarthric ASR performance while keeping storage and computational costs low, offering a practical path for personalized speech recognition in clinical settings."
By Bernard Muller, L\'aszl\'o T\'oth, LaVonne Roberts
The paper shows that HuggingFace’s ByteLevel pre‑tokenizer, which treats a word as a sequence of Unicode letters, splits abugida scripts at every vowel sign, creating a training‑free lower bound on tokenizer fertility. Across 26 languages, all 17 abugidas exhibit increased token counts (up to 9×), while Latin, Cyrillic, Hangul, and Han remain unchanged. The authors demonstrate that correcting the character class reduces Nepali token counts, improves model performance, and that this issue is widespread in popular HuggingFace models.
By Sajal Regmi, Siddhartha Pudasaini, Chetan Phakami Pun
The paper reports that scene text recognition models, while achieving 89–97% accuracy on standard benchmarks, perform significantly worse on rare word–trigram combinations, with a 10–18 point drop in accuracy at the rare‑word/rare‑trigram corner across multiple languages and models. Scaling the vision backbone improves overall accuracy but does not alleviate this corner‑specific deficit. The authors identify the autoregressive decoder’s lexical prior as the root cause and show that architectural changes—specifically moving from autoregressive to CTC decoding—yield the largest improvement for these rare compositions.
By Genpei Zhang
arXiv:2608. 12327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual pretrained models nominally support Nepali, yet no controlled benchmark has compared them under a single fine-tuning protocol.
By Suman Paudel, Sarbin Sayami
AraMS-28k is the largest publicly released line‑level dataset of genuine historical Arabic manuscripts, containing 14 books, 3,043 pages, and 28,600 annotated text lines (27,971 main‑text and 629 margin). The dataset spans three script traditions—Naskh, Ruq'ah, and Maghrebi—and includes a lithographed printed edition for format diversity. Each line is labeled as main‑text or margin, with margin lines that have a clear attachment point annotated with an insertion anchor to recover the manuscript’s true non‑linear reading order; both fully vocalized and diacritic‑normalized transcriptions are provided, and the data was produced via the RefLAM pipeline combining OCR, clean transcriptions, and human review.
"whyItMatters":"The dataset’s comprehensive line‑level annotations, including reading‑order anchors and dual transcription formats, enable reproducible research on Arabic manuscript recognition, layout analysis, and reading‑order recovery under a CC BY‑NC‑SA 4.0 license."
By Mohamed Guechaoui, Mohamed Diaa Zellagui, Souleyman Chaib, Sahraoui Dhelim
arXiv:2608. 19385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Historical Arabic manuscript transcription is not only a recognition problem.
By Abdullah Ahmed Ali, Mohammed Thamer Abdulhadi, Ali Haider Safaa, Dhulfiqar Mahdi Wadi
IndicQE-APE is a consolidated benchmark that unifies quality estimation (QE) and automatic post‑editing (APE) data for nine Indic language pairs, comprising 126,754 instances with multiple aligned labels such as direct assessment, human post‑edit, word‑level OK/BAD tags, and error explanations. The dataset includes a stratified test set across four difficulty axes and supports training and evaluation of six prompted large language models, three COMET metrics, and three APE systems. Experiments reveal that segments with conflicting holistic and token‑level quality signals are consistently ranked lower, while annotator disagreement shows no effect when controlled for score distribution.
whyItMatters":"The benchmark provides a unified resource for training and evaluating QE and APE across Indic languages, enabling consistent comparison of models and metrics on a shared dataset."
By Diptesh Kanojia, Archchana Sindhujan, Sourabh Deoghare, Daria Sokova, Shenbin Qian, Girish Koushik, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Constantin Or\u{a}san, Chrysoula Zerva, Ricardo Rei, Fr\'ed\'eric Blain, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Marco Turchi, Matteo Negri, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Mitesh M. Khapra, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
RefLAM is a pipeline that converts manuscript page images and clean transcriptions into validated, line-level ground truth for Arabic handwritten text recognition. It combines a deep‑learning page‑segmentation model, a multimodal large language model for structured OCR, and a diacritic‑agnostic fuzzy alignment engine that assigns a confidence score to each line, with a provable correctness guarantee for perfect scores. Using RefLAM, the authors achieved a 75× speedup over manual annotation and released AraMS‑28k, a dataset of 14 historical Arabic manuscripts with detailed annotations.
By Mohamed Guechaoui, Mohamed Diaa Zellagui, Souleyman Chaib, Sahraoui Dhelim