arXiv AI By Fendji K. E. Jean Louis

Towards Model as a Library: Offline, Community-Sourced AI for Low-Resource African Languages

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arXiv AI
Sep 21

MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs

MENASpeechBank is a new reference voice bank that provides about 18,000 high‑quality utterances from 124 speakers across multiple MENA countries, covering English, Modern Standard Arabic, and regional Arabic varieties. The dataset is built through a controllable pipeline that creates persona profiles inspired by the World Values Survey, defines a taxonomy of roughly 5,000 conversational scenarios, matches personas to scenarios via semantic similarity, and generates around 417,000 role‑play conversations using an LLM. Synthetic speaker‑conditioned user‑turn audio is produced from reference recordings to maintain speaker diversity, and both synthetic and human‑recorded conversations are evaluated and analyzed for quality.

By Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Rabindra Nath Nandi, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam
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 AI
Aug 19

Language Family Matters: Evaluating LLM-Based ASR Across Linguistic Boundaries

The paper introduces a new strategy for connecting large language models (LLMs) to speech encoders in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by sharing a single connector across languages within the same linguistic family. This approach reduces the number of parameters needed compared to training a separate connector for each language, while improving generalization across different domains and real‑world corpora. Experiments with two multilingual LLMs and two speech datasets demonstrate that family‑based connectors are both efficient and effective for multilingual ASR deployment.

By Yuchen Zhang, Ravi Shekhar, Haralambos Mouratidis