The paper introduces a method for measuring accent differences that balances interpretability and practicality. It proposes using articulatory representations obtained via articulatory inversion as an interpretable basis for accent comparison, while employing optimal transport to compare accents across any type of recording. This approach aims to overcome the limitations of traditional phonetic analyses and embedding‑based methods, which are either time‑consuming or non‑interpretable.
By Charles McGhee, Mark J. F. Gales, Kate M. Knill
The paper introduces task-informed parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods for low-resource speech recognition by applying Fisher-Whitened Cross-Covariance Analysis (FCCA) to Whisper and Qwen3-ASR. Two extensions—Asymmetric-Coupled FCCA (AC‑FCCA) and Adaptive‑Rank FCCA (AR‑FCCA)—are proposed to exploit cross‑layer sharing and adapt rank allocation within a fixed parameter budget. Experiments on multilingual datasets show that standard FCCA matches or surpasses LoRA, while AR‑FCCA consistently improves performance across models without increasing trainable parameters.
By Asmee Mishra, Mengjie Qian, Brechtje Post, Kate Knill
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
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:2609.17981v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs), typically built from a pre-trained speech encoder, a modality projector, and an LLM fine-tuned with Low-R...
By Mohan Shi, Zilai Wang, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Kaiyuan Zhang, Eray Eren, Abeer Alwan
arXiv:2610.27002v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Tibetan speech recognition is usually evaluated with character or syllable error rates because the writing system does not mark word boundaries. These...
By Jacob Moore, Sheng Li