Daily Papers

Traditionally, bioacoustics has relied on spectrograms and continuous, per-frame audio representations for the analysis of animal sounds, also serving as input to machine learning models. Meanwhile, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) system has provided an interpretable, language-independent method for transcribing human speech sounds. In this paper, we introduce ISPA (Inter-Species Phonetic Alphabet), a precise, concise, and interpretable system designed for transcribing animal sounds into text. We compare acoustics-based and feature-based methods for transcribing and classifying animal sounds, demonstrating their comparable performance with baseline methods utilizing continuous, dense audio representations. By representing animal sounds with text, we effectively treat them as a "foreign language," and we show that established human language ML paradigms and models, such as language models, can be successfully applied to improve performance.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) serves to systematize phonemes in language, enabling precise textual representation of pronunciation. In Bengali phonology and phonetics, ongoing scholarly deliberations persist concerning the IPA standard and core Bengali phonemes. This work examines prior research, identifies current and potential issues, and suggests a framework for a Bengali IPA standard, facilitating linguistic analysis and NLP resource creation and downstream technology development. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of Bengali IPA transcription and introduce a novel IPA transcription framework incorporating a novel dataset with DL-based benchmarks.

Most undeciphered lost languages exhibit two characteristics that pose significant decipherment challenges: (1) the scripts are not fully segmented into words; (2) the closest known language is not determined. We propose a decipherment model that handles both of these challenges by building on rich linguistic constraints reflecting consistent patterns in historical sound change. We capture the natural phonological geometry by learning character embeddings based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The resulting generative framework jointly models word segmentation and cognate alignment, informed by phonological constraints. We evaluate the model on both deciphered languages (Gothic, Ugaritic) and an undeciphered one (Iberian). The experiments show that incorporating phonetic geometry leads to clear and consistent gains. Additionally, we propose a measure for language closeness which correctly identifies related languages for Gothic and Ugaritic. For Iberian, the method does not show strong evidence supporting Basque as a related language, concurring with the favored position by the current scholarship.

Despite its widespread use, Bengali lacks a robust automated International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription system that effectively supports both standard language and regional dialectal texts. Existing approaches struggle to handle regional variations, numerical expressions, and generalize poorly to previously unseen words. To address these limitations, we propose BanglaIPA, a novel IPA generation system that integrates a character-based vocabulary with word-level alignment. The proposed system accurately handles Bengali numerals and demonstrates strong performance across regional dialects. BanglaIPA improves inference efficiency by leveraging a precomputed word-to-IPA mapping dictionary for previously observed words. The system is evaluated on the standard Bengali and six regional variations of the DUAL-IPA dataset. Experimental results show that BanglaIPA outperforms baseline IPA transcription models by 58.4-78.7% and achieves an overall mean word error rate of 11.4%, highlighting its robustness in phonetic transcription generation for the Bengali language.

There exist three approaches for multilingual and crosslingual automatic speech recognition (MCL-ASR) - supervised pretraining with phonetic or graphemic transcription, and self-supervised pretraining. We find that pretraining with phonetic supervision has been underappreciated so far for MCL-ASR, while conceptually it is more advantageous for information sharing between different languages. This paper explores the approach of pretraining with weakly phonetic supervision towards data-efficient MCL-ASR, which is called Whistle. We relax the requirement of gold-standard human-validated phonetic transcripts, and obtain International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) based transcription by leveraging the LanguageNet grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) models. We construct a common experimental setup based on the CommonVoice dataset, called CV-Lang10, with 10 seen languages and 2 unseen languages. A set of experiments are conducted on CV-Lang10 to compare, as fair as possible, the three approaches under the common setup for MCL-ASR. Experiments demonstrate the advantages of phoneme-based models (Whistle) for MCL-ASR, in terms of speech recognition for seen languages, crosslingual performance for unseen languages with different amounts of few-shot data, overcoming catastrophic forgetting, and training efficiency. It is found that when training data is more limited, phoneme supervision can achieve better results compared to subword supervision and self-supervision, thereby providing higher data-efficiency. To support reproducibility and promote future research along this direction, we release the code, models and data for the entire pipeline of Whistle at https://github.com/thu-spmi/CAT/tree/master/egs/cv-lang10.

This work aims to build a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system for ten lower-resourced Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Sakha, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek. We specifically target the zero-shot learning scenario, where a TTS model trained using the data of one language is applied to synthesise speech for other, unseen languages. An end-to-end TTS system based on the Tacotron 2 architecture was trained using only the available data of the Kazakh language. To generate speech for the other Turkic languages, we first mapped the letters of the Turkic alphabets onto the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which were then converted to the Kazakh alphabet letters. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, we evaluated the multilingual Turkic TTS model subjectively and obtained promising results. To enable replication of the experiments, we make our code and dataset publicly available in our GitHub repository.

In this project, we demonstrate that phoneme-based models for speech processing can achieve strong crosslinguistic generalizability to unseen languages. We curated the IPAPACK, a massively multilingual speech corpora with phonemic transcriptions, encompassing more than 115 languages from diverse language families, selectively checked by linguists. Based on the IPAPACK, we propose CLAP-IPA, a multi-lingual phoneme-speech contrastive embedding model capable of open-vocabulary matching between arbitrary speech signals and phonemic sequences. The proposed model was tested on 95 unseen languages, showing strong generalizability across languages. Temporal alignments between phonemes and speech signals also emerged from contrastive training, enabling zeroshot forced alignment in unseen languages. We further introduced a neural forced aligner IPA-ALIGNER by finetuning CLAP-IPA with the Forward-Sum loss to learn better phone-to-audio alignment. Evaluation results suggest that IPA-ALIGNER can generalize to unseen languages without adaptation.

In this paper, we introduce two resources: (i) G2P+, a tool for converting orthographic datasets to a consistent phonemic representation; and (ii) IPA CHILDES, a phonemic dataset of child-centered speech across 31 languages. Prior tools for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion result in phonemic vocabularies that are inconsistent with established phonemic inventories, an issue which G2P+ addresses by leveraging the inventories in the Phoible database. Using this tool, we augment CHILDES with phonemic transcriptions to produce IPA CHILDES. This new resource fills several gaps in existing phonemic datasets, which often lack multilingual coverage, spontaneous speech, and a focus on child-directed language. We demonstrate the utility of this dataset for phonological research by training phoneme language models on 11 languages and probing them for distinctive features, finding that the distributional properties of phonemes are sufficient to learn major class and place features cross-lingually.

Real-time text-to-speech (TTS) for Modern Hebrew is challenging due to the language's orthographic complexity. Existing solutions ignore crucial phonetic features such as stress that remain underspecified even when vowel marks are added. To address these limitations, we introduce Phonikud, a lightweight, open-source Hebrew grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system that outputs fully-specified IPA transcriptions. Our approach adapts an existing diacritization model with lightweight adaptors, incurring negligible additional latency. We also contribute the ILSpeech dataset of transcribed Hebrew speech with IPA annotations, serving as a benchmark for Hebrew G2P, as training data for TTS systems, and enabling audio-to-IPA for evaluating TTS performance while capturing important phonetic details. Our results demonstrate that Phonikud G2P conversion more accurately predicts phonemes from Hebrew text compared to prior methods, and that this enables training of effective real-time Hebrew TTS models with superior speed-accuracy trade-offs. We release our code, data, and models at https: //phonikud.github.io.

Preference alignment has emerged as an effective strategy to enhance the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) following supervised fine-tuning. While existing preference alignment methods predominantly target hallucination factors, they overlook the factors essential for multi-modal comprehension capabilities, often narrowing their improvements on hallucination mitigation. To bridge this gap, we propose Instruction-oriented Preference Alignment (IPA), a scalable framework designed to automatically construct alignment preferences grounded in instruction fulfillment efficacy. Our method involves an automated preference construction coupled with a dedicated verification process that identifies instruction-oriented factors, avoiding significant variability in response representations. Additionally, IPA incorporates a progressive preference collection pipeline, further recalling challenging samples through model self-evolution and reference-guided refinement. Experiments conducted on Qwen2VL-7B demonstrate IPA's effectiveness across multiple benchmarks, including hallucination evaluation, visual question answering, and text understanding tasks, highlighting its capability to enhance general comprehension.

Pronunciation dictionaries are an important component in the process of speech forced alignment. The accuracy of these dictionaries has a strong effect on the aligned speech data since they help the mapping between orthographic transcriptions and acoustic signals. In this paper, I present the creation of a comprehensive pronunciation dictionary in Spanish (ESPADA) that can be used in most of the dialect variants of Spanish data. Current dictionaries focus on specific regional variants, but with the flexible nature of our tool, it can be readily applied to capture the most common phonetic differences across major dialectal variants. We propose improvements to current pronunciation dictionaries as well as mapping other relevant annotations such as morphological and lexical information. In terms of size, it is currently the most complete dictionary with more than 628,000 entries, representing words from 16 countries. All entries come with their corresponding pronunciations, morphological and lexical tagging, and other relevant information for phonetic analysis: stress patterns, phonotactics, IPA transcriptions, and more. This aims to equip socio-phonetic researchers with a complete open-source tool that enhances dialectal research within socio-phonetic frameworks in the Spanish language.

Universal phoneme recognition typically requires analyzing long speech segments and language-specific patterns. Many speech processing tasks require pure phoneme representations free from contextual influence, which motivated our development of CUPE - a lightweight model that captures key phoneme features in just 120 milliseconds, about one phoneme's length. CUPE processes short, fixed-width windows independently and, despite fewer parameters than current approaches, achieves competitive cross-lingual performance by learning fundamental acoustic patterns common to all languages. Our extensive evaluation through supervised and self-supervised training on diverse languages, including zero-shot tests on the UCLA Phonetic Corpus, demonstrates strong cross-lingual generalization and reveals that effective universal speech processing is possible through modeling basic acoustic patterns within phoneme-length windows.

Current state of the art acoustic models can easily comprise more than 100 million parameters. This growing complexity demands larger training datasets to maintain a decent generalization of the final decision function. An ideal dataset is not necessarily large in size, but large with respect to the amount of unique speakers, utilized hardware and varying recording conditions. This enables a machine learning model to explore as much of the domain-specific input space as possible during parameter estimation. This work introduces Common Phone, a gender-balanced, multilingual corpus recorded from more than 11.000 contributors via Mozilla's Common Voice project. It comprises around 116 hours of speech enriched with automatically generated phonetic segmentation. A Wav2Vec 2.0 acoustic model was trained with the Common Phone to perform phonetic symbol recognition and validate the quality of the generated phonetic annotation. The architecture achieved a PER of 18.1 % on the entire test set, computed with all 101 unique phonetic symbols, showing slight differences between the individual languages. We conclude that Common Phone provides sufficient variability and reliable phonetic annotation to help bridging the gap between research and application of acoustic models.

Writing systems of Indic languages have orthographic syllables, also known as complex graphemes, as unique horizontal units. A prominent feature of these languages is these complex grapheme units that comprise consonants/consonant conjuncts, vowel diacritics, and consonant diacritics, which, together make a unique Language. Unicode-based writing schemes of these languages often disregard this feature of these languages and encode words as linear sequences of Unicode characters using an intricate scheme of connector characters and font interpreters. Due to this way of using a few dozen Unicode glyphs to write thousands of different unique glyphs (complex graphemes), there are serious ambiguities that lead to malformed words. In this paper, we are proposing two libraries: i) a normalizer for normalizing inconsistencies caused by a Unicode-based encoding scheme for Indic languages and ii) a grapheme parser for Abugida text. It deconstructs words into visually distinct orthographic syllables or complex graphemes and their constituents. Our proposed normalizer is a more efficient and effective tool than the previously used IndicNLP normalizer. Moreover, our parser and normalizer are also suitable tools for general Abugida text processing as they performed well in our robust word-based and NLP experiments. We report the pipeline for the scripts of 7 languages in this work and develop the framework for the integration of more scripts.

Since the advent of personal computing devices, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) have been one of the key technologies that researchers and engineers have focused on, aiming to help users efficiently obtain information and execute tasks, and provide users with more intelligent, convenient, and rich interaction experiences. With the development of smartphones and IoT, computing and sensing devices have become ubiquitous, greatly expanding the boundaries of IPAs. However, due to the lack of capabilities such as user intent understanding, task planning, tool using, and personal data management etc., existing IPAs still have limited practicality and scalability. Recently, the emergence of foundation models, represented by large language models (LLMs), brings new opportunities for the development of IPAs. With the powerful semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities, LLM can enable intelligent agents to solve complex problems autonomously. In this paper, we focus on Personal LLM Agents, which are LLM-based agents that are deeply integrated with personal data and personal devices and used for personal assistance. We envision that Personal LLM Agents will become a major software paradigm for end-users in the upcoming era. To realize this vision, we take the first step to discuss several important questions about Personal LLM Agents, including their architecture, capability, efficiency and security. We start by summarizing the key components and design choices in the architecture of Personal LLM Agents, followed by an in-depth analysis of the opinions collected from domain experts. Next, we discuss several key challenges to achieve intelligent, efficient and secure Personal LLM Agents, followed by a comprehensive survey of representative solutions to address these challenges.