arXiv Computation and Language

A Situational Speech Synthesizer for Yoruba: System Design, Phonological Rule Architecture, and Orthographic Extensions for Contour

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

Marking Contour Tones in Yor\`{u}b\'{a}

arXiv:2609.38627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Yor\`ub\'a is a tonal language in which contour tones pose persistent orthographic challenges. These are especially notable for personal names and lexi...

By K\'ol\'a T\'ub\`os\'un
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Vagdhenu: A Vrutta (Meter) Aware Shloka-to-Chant (TTS) System for Sanskrit

Vagdhenu is a Sanskrit shloka‑to‑chant text‑to‑speech system that preserves meter (vrutta) and phonological nuances. It builds on an off‑the‑shelf flow‑matching backbone and a large‑scale neural vocoder, adding a Kannada‑based frontend to avoid schwa deletion, a phonology‑aware frontend handling visarga sandhi and sibilant distinctions, and a vrutta‑aware reference selection mechanism. The authors report that a text‑side prosody conditioner is ineffective in their architecture, while reference clips and voice‑steering retraining provide the necessary prosody control, and they demonstrate the system’s performance on a 32‑chapter video corpus and an audio app covering 18,000 verses. whyItMatters":"The system delivers high‑fidelity, meter‑aware Sanskrit chanting, enabling large‑scale deployment of authentic recitations for educational and cultural preservation purposes."

By Prathosh A P
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Beyond Word Error Rate: A Switch Aware Evaluation of ASR and Audio Language Models on English Yoruba Code-Switched Speech

arXiv:2609. 11786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and audio language models (audio LMs) now report low error rates on monolingual benchmarks, but their behavior on code switched speech in low resource, diacritic rich languages remains poorly characterized.

By Chibuzor Okocha, Christan Earl Grant