arXiv Machine Learning

BabyHuBERT: Multilingual Self-Supervised Learning for Segmenting Speakers in Child-Centered Long-Form Recordings

arXiv:2509. 15001v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Child-centered daylong recordings are essential for studying early language development, but existing speech models trained on clean adult data perform poorly due to acoustic and linguistic differences.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Enabling automatic transcription of child-centered audio recordings from real-world environments

The paper presents a method to automatically identify utterances in child-centered daylong audio recordings that can be reliably transcribed by modern ASR systems, enabling accurate transcription of a substantial portion of the speech. On four English corpora, the approach achieves a median WER of 0% and a mean WER of 16% when transcribing 30% of the total speech, compared to a median WER of 52% when transcribing all speech. Word frequency distributions from the automatic transcripts correlate strongly with manual annotations (r = 0.94 overall, r = 0.99 for frequent words).

By Daniil Kocharov, Azarias Galama, Okko R\"as\"anen
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Self-Supervised Speech Representations Track Spoken Language Convergence to Adult Models in Infants and Children Who Are Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing

The study demonstrates that self‑supervised speech embeddings can track how children’s speech converges toward adult patterns over development. Using HuBERT‑BASE embeddings extracted from over 925 hours of child‑caregiver recordings, the researchers found that the acoustic distance between a child’s vocalizations and those of their female caregiver decreased with the child’s hearing age, even after controlling for pitch and vocalization length. This single distance metric also correlated with several standardized speech and language assessments from infancy through preschoolhood, suggesting a scalable, language‑neutral way to monitor spoken language development in everyday settings.

By L. Choy, A. S. Khan, S. Patrizi, D. Ye, J. Gross, M. Cychosz
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Cross-Linguistic Effects in Bilingual Phoneme BabyLMs

arXiv:2609.37121v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-linguistic effects are a central topic in bilingual first-language acquisition. Artificial learners can help investigate L1-L2 interactions by en...

By Nikitas Theodoropoulos, Maria Lymperaiou, Giorgos Filandrianos
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Deriving Benchmarking Datasets from Long-Form Recordings: Challenges and Opportunities

arXiv:2607. 03201v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-form recordings (LFRs) of child-centered audio are ecologically valid sources for studying early language development, but three problems limit their use.

By Kaveri K. Sheth, Lawrence Borst, Tarek Kunze, Marvin Lavechin, Okko R\"as\"anen, Sho Tsuji, Loann Peurey, Alix Bourr\'ee, Alejandrina Cristia
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 2

Efficient ASR Training with Conversations that Never Happened

Conversational ASR for lower-resource languages and niche domains is limited by the scarcity of domain-matched multi-speaker training data. We propose an augmentation pipeline that generates scenario-level dialogues with participant metadata, maps speaker attributes to TTS voice profiles, and assembles synthesized utterances into speaker-aware simulated conversations.