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 6

MERaLiON-GR: Speech Gender Recognition Model for English and SEA Languages

arXiv:2608. 04433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present MERaLiON-GR, a speech gender recognition system that performs binary classification (female / male) on English and Southeast Asian (SEA) languages.

By Qiongqiong Wang, Ai Ti Aw, Nancy F. Chen, Ying Lay Chiu, Yang Ding, Yingxu He, Ridong Jiang, Zhuohan Liu, Yanfeng Lu, Yi Ma, Muhammad Huzaifah, Nabilah Binte Md Johan, Nattadaporn Lertcheva, Pham Minh Duc, Sailor Hardik Bhupendra, Siti Umairah Binte Mohammad Salleh, Shuo Sun, Tarun Kumar Vangani, Jeremy H. M. Wong, Jinyang Wu, Longyin Zhang
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
Aug 28

AfriSwitch: A Benchmark for In-the-Wild African Code-Switched Speech Recognition

AfriSwitch is a 61.36‑hour, human‑transcribed benchmark of in‑the‑wild code‑switched speech covering 16 African languages and varieties, annotated with switch‑level English span tags, per‑utterance Code‑Mixing Index (CMI), and switch‑point counts. The corpus reveals that code‑switching behaviour varies widely across languages, with no single metric fully capturing how code‑switched a language is. Benchmarking five open and commercial multilingual ASR systems in a zero‑shot setting shows high word error rates, with the best system averaging 35.93% WER and none dropping below 24% on any language, indicating that Africa‑targeted training rather than model scale or nominal language coverage best predicts performance.

By Gabrial Zencha Ashungafac, Busayo Awobade, Tobi Olatunji
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Models

The paper evaluates bias in phoneme-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, focusing on WhisperIPA and ZIPA, which produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions. Using multilingual speech corpora and demographically annotated English datasets, the authors compare model-generated IPA against grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) outputs with both standard phoneme error rate (PER) and a new Soft PER metric that allows linguistically similar substitutions. The study finds persistent disparities across language, gender, accent, ethnicity, and age, even when accounting for acceptable phonemic variation.

By Maneesha Rani Saha, Catherine Bao, Neal Patwari
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

SEA-SpeechBench: A Large-Scale Multitask Benchmark for Speech Understanding Across Southeast Asia

SEA-SpeechBench is a large‑scale multitask benchmark for speech understanding in 11 Southeast Asian languages, comprising 97,194 samples across 99 evaluation sets and 597 hours of curated audio. It covers nine tasks in three categories—speech processing, paralinguistic analysis, and a novel temporal understanding dimension—using multilingual prompting in both native SEA languages and English. Evaluation of current models shows significant performance gaps, especially in temporal understanding, emotion recognition, and speech translation, with low‑resource languages lagging behind English by up to 41 percentage points.

By Jingyi Liao, Wenyu Zhang, Zhuohan Liu, Yingxu He, Geyu Lin, Xunlong Zou, Shuo Sun, Syed Ali Redha Alsagoff, Ai Ti Aw