9 research outputs found
The complementary roles of non-verbal cues for Robust Pronunciation Assessment
Research on pronunciation assessment systems focuses on utilizing phonetic
and phonological aspects of non-native (L2) speech, often neglecting the rich
layer of information hidden within the non-verbal cues. In this study, we
proposed a novel pronunciation assessment framework, IntraVerbalPA. % The
framework innovatively incorporates both fine-grained frame- and abstract
utterance-level non-verbal cues, alongside the conventional speech and phoneme
representations. Additionally, we introduce ''Goodness of phonemic-duration''
metric to effectively model duration distribution within the framework. Our
results validate the effectiveness of the proposed IntraVerbalPA framework and
its individual components, yielding performance that either matches or
outperforms existing research works.Comment: 5 pages, submitted to ICASSP 202
Automatic Pronunciation Assessment -- A Review
Pronunciation assessment and its application in computer-aided pronunciation
training (CAPT) have seen impressive progress in recent years. With the rapid
growth in language processing and deep learning over the past few years, there
is a need for an updated review. In this paper, we review methods employed in
pronunciation assessment for both phonemic and prosodic. We categorize the main
challenges observed in prominent research trends, and highlight existing
limitations, and available resources. This is followed by a discussion of the
remaining challenges and possible directions for future work.Comment: 9 pages, accepted to EMNLP Finding
Multi-View Multi-Task Representation Learning for Mispronunciation Detection
The disparity in phonology between learner's native (L1) and target (L2)
language poses a significant challenge for mispronunciation detection and
diagnosis (MDD) systems. This challenge is further intensified by lack of
annotated L2 data. This paper proposes a novel MDD architecture that exploits
multiple `views' of the same input data assisted by auxiliary tasks to learn
more distinctive phonetic representation in a low-resource setting. Using the
mono- and multilingual encoders, the model learn multiple views of the input,
and capture the sound properties across diverse languages and accents. These
encoded representations are further enriched by learning articulatory features
in a multi-task setup. Our reported results using the L2-ARCTIC data
outperformed the SOTA models, with a phoneme error rate reduction of 11.13% and
8.60% and absolute F1 score increase of 5.89%, and 2.49% compared to the
single-view mono- and multilingual systems, with a limited L2 dataset.Comment: 5 page
SpeechBlender: Speech Augmentation Framework for Mispronunciation Data Generation
One of the biggest challenges in designing mispronunciation detection models
is the unavailability of labeled L2 speech data. To overcome such data
scarcity, we introduce SpeechBlender -- a fine-grained data augmentation
pipeline for generating mispronunciation errors. The SpeechBlender utilizes
varieties of masks to target different regions of a phonetic unit, and use the
mixing factors to linearly interpolate raw speech signals while generating
erroneous pronunciation instances. The masks facilitate smooth blending of the
signals, thus generating more effective samples than the `Cut/Paste' method. We
show the effectiveness of our augmentation technique in a phoneme-level
pronunciation quality assessment task, leveraging only a good pronunciation
dataset. With SpeechBlender augmentation, we observed a 3% and 2% increase in
Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) compared to no-augmentation and goodness
of pronunciation augmentation scenarios respectively for Speechocean762
testset. Moreover, a 2% rise in PCC is observed when comparing our single-task
phoneme-level mispronunciation detection model with a multi-task learning model
using multiple-granularity information.Comment: 5 pages, submitted to ICASSP 202
Benchmarking Arabic AI with Large Language Models
With large Foundation Models (FMs), language technologies (AI in general) are
entering a new paradigm: eliminating the need for developing large-scale
task-specific datasets and supporting a variety of tasks through set-ups
ranging from zero-shot to few-shot learning. However, understanding FMs
capabilities requires a systematic benchmarking effort by comparing FMs
performance with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) task-specific models. With that
goal, past work focused on the English language and included a few efforts with
multiple languages. Our study contributes to ongoing research by evaluating FMs
performance for standard Arabic NLP and Speech processing, including a range of
tasks from sequence tagging to content classification across diverse domains.
We start with zero-shot learning using GPT-3.5-turbo, Whisper, and USM,
addressing 33 unique tasks using 59 publicly available datasets resulting in 96
test setups. For a few tasks, FMs performs on par or exceeds the performance of
the SOTA models but for the majority it under-performs. Given the importance of
prompt for the FMs performance, we discuss our prompt strategies in detail and
elaborate on our findings. Our future work on Arabic AI will explore few-shot
prompting, expand the range of tasks, and investigate additional open-source
models.Comment: Foundation Models, Large Language Models, Arabic NLP, Arabic Speech,
Arabic AI, , CHatGPT Evaluation, USM Evaluation, Whisper Evaluatio
Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search
Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe
Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search
Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press
Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search
Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press