Phonetic forced alignment is a key technique in phonetic research, yet existing alignment systems lack specialized models for low-resource language varieties. We address this by training text-dependent and text-independent aligners for Chengdu Mandarin using a 17-hour corpus and a custom G2P dictionary.
The paper introduces two new corpus‑level, reference‑free metrics—Phoneme‑Cluster Mutual Information (PCMI) and Word Acoustic Consistency Score (WACS)—that use self‑supervised speech representations to evaluate forced alignment quality. PCMI quantifies how well aligned phoneme labels agree with clusters derived from SSL representations, while WACS assesses consistency across repeated word realizations via dynamic time warping of word representation sequences. Experiments on 85 languages from FLEURS and 45 languages in DoReCo show that both metrics degrade predictably under alignment perturbations, effectively distinguish high‑ from low‑quality alignments, and correlate strongly with traditional timestamp‑based measures, enabling scalable, multilingual alignment evaluation without manual annotations.
By V. S. D. S. Mahesh Akavarapu, Michael Daniel, Gerhard J\"ager
arXiv:2510.22172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The Continuous Integrate-and-Fire (CIF) mechanism provides effective alignment for non-autoregressive (NAR) speech recognition. This mechanis...
By Ruixiang Mao, Xiangnan Ma, Qing Yang, Ziming Zhu, Yucheng Qiao, Yuan Ge, Tong Xiao, Shengxiang Gao, Zhengtao Yu, Jingbo Zhu
arXiv:2602.19574v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large-language-model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems can generate natural speech, but most are not designed for low-latency dual-str...
By Hanwen Liu, Saierdaer Yusuyin, Hao Huang, Zhijian Ou
arXiv:2609.13615v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: For our submission to the WMT26 Creole Language Translation Shared Task, we focus on machine translation (MT) models for Pacific creoles: Tok Pisin, Bi...
By Rapha\"el Merx, Nick Thieberger, Ekaterina Vylomova
Text-to-speech systems increasingly process user-generated text (UGT) such as ppl and imo, whose pronunciation must be inferred from the canonical rather than surface form. We introduce UGTPhon, the f...