Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2310.11004

Advanced accent/dialect identification and accentedness assessment with multi-embedding models and automatic speech recognition

Shahram Ghorbani·John H. L. Hansen
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Accurately classifying accents and assessing accentedness in non-native speakers are both challenging tasks due to the complexity and diversity of accent and dialect variations. In this study, embeddings from advanced pre-trained language identification (LID) and speaker identification (SID) models are leveraged to improve the accuracy of accent classification and non-native accentedness assessment. Findings demonstrate that employing pre-trained LID and SID models effectively encodes accent/dialect information in speech. Furthermore, the LID and SID encoded accent information complement an end-to-end accent identification (AID) model trained from scratch. By incorporating all three embeddings, the proposed multi-embedding AID system achieves superior accuracy in accent identification. Next, we investigate leveraging automatic speech recognition (ASR) and accent identification models to explore accentedness estimation. The ASR model is an end-to-end connectionist temporal classification (CTC) model trained exclusively with en-US utterances. The ASR error rate and en-US output of the AID model are leveraged as objective accentedness scores. Evaluation results demonstrate a strong correlation between the scores estimated by the two models. Additionally, a robust correlation between the objective accentedness scores and subjective scores based on human perception is demonstrated, providing evidence for the reliability and validity of utilizing AID-based and ASR-based systems for accentedness assessment in non-native speech.

Explore related subjects

eess.ASeess.SP

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Shahram Ghorbani, John H. L. Hansen. 2023-10-17. Advanced accent/dialect identification and accentedness assessment with multi-embedding models and automatic speech recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11004

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Diarization Error Decomposition Under Pause Annotation Ambiguity

Speaker diarization evaluation is sensitive to ambiguity in pause annotation, which can inflate diarization error rate (DER) or obscure genuine model errors. We show that morphological closing, which has been used for pause-tolerant diarization evaluation, discards segment-level distinctions. Instead, we propose an exact, overlap-aware decomposition of standard DER into a pause-attributable component, consisting of errors compatible with pause filling, and a residual core component that can serve as a proxy for intrinsic diarization errors. The decomposition leaves DER unchanged, while the pause-attributable and core components vary monotonically with the pause threshold and eventually saturate. Experiments spanning synthetic transformations, annotation mismatch, cross-domain evaluation, and tight-boundary diarization show that the decomposition reveals error sources not apparent from standard DER.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Less can be More: What Aspects of Speech Drive End-of-Turn Detection

In conversational AI, detecting when a speaker has finished talking is crucial for natural turn taking. While recent work incorporates semantics, the relative contribution of different modalities remains unclear. We present a controlled ablation of acoustic, prosodic, and semantic signals for streaming end of turn detection using a lightweight trimodal classifier. Under identical training conditions, the acoustic prosodic combination achieves the best balance of accuracy and latency, achieving utterance F1 of 0.93 with 7.8% false alarms at 400ms median latency. Adding text increases premature detections without improving performance. Feature space analysis confirms that prosodic features have the strongest class separability, while text representations overlap substantially. These findings suggest that turn-taking is primarily conveyed through intonation and silence patterns rather than semantic completeness, enabling faster and more reliable systems without expensive text inference.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Downstream-Task-Aware Unified Source Separation

Task-aware unified source separation (TUSS) enables a single model to handle diverse separation tasks by conditioning on input prompts. However, conventional TUSS does not account for downstream task requirements, such as whether the enhanced speech will be used for human listening or automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we propose a prompt extension framework for TUSS that incorporates downstream task information into the input prompts and switches the loss function according to the given prompt during training, enabling outputs with different signal characteristics at inference time. Specifically, we introduce an ASR-dedicated prompt paired with a regularized loss function that reduces speech artifacts to improve ASR robustness, while the standard prompt is paired with the conventional SNR loss function. Experiments on the LibriSpeech and JNAS corpora demonstrate that the proposed joint-training scheme enables a single model to improve ASR performance over noisy input across a wide range of SNR conditions by selecting the ASR-dedicated prompt, while maintaining general speech enhancement quality when the standard prompt is used.

eess.AS↗