7 papers
Data Augmentation for L2 English Speaking Assessment using TTS
Stefano Bannò, Penny Karanasou, Mengjie Qian +2
Automated assessment of second language (L2) speaking proficiency requires substantial annotated speech data, which are scarce compared to written learner corpora. We investigate w…
Exploiting the English Grammar Profile for L2 grammatical analysis with LLMs
Stefano Bannò, Penny Karanasou, Kate Knill +1
Evaluating the grammatical competence of second language (L2) learners is essential both for providing targeted feedback and for assessing proficiency. To achieve this, we propose…
Data Augmentation for Spoken Grammatical Error Correction
Penny Karanasou, Mengjie Qian, Stefano Bannò +2
While there exist strong benchmark datasets for grammatical error correction (GEC), high-quality annotated spoken datasets for Spoken GEC (SGEC) are still under-resourced. In this…
Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Tasks and Baseline Systems
Mengjie Qian, Kate Knill, Stefano Banno +4
This paper presents the "Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Spoken Language Assessment and Feedback" -- a challenge associated with the ISCA SLaTE 2025 Workshop. The goal of the chall…
Controllable Emphasis with zero data for text-to-speech
Arnaud Joly, Marco Nicolis, Ekaterina Peterova +11
We present a scalable method to produce high quality emphasis for text-to-speech (TTS) that does not require recordings or annotations. Many TTS models include a phoneme duration m…
Simple and Effective Multi-sentence TTS with Expressive and Coherent Prosody
Peter Makarov, Ammar Abbas, Mateusz Łajszczak +5
Generating expressive and contextually appropriate prosody remains a challenge for modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems. This is particularly evident for long, multi-sentence inputs…
Multi-Scale Spectrogram Modelling for Neural Text-to-Speech
Ammar Abbas, Bajibabu Bollepalli, Alexis Moinet +6
We propose a novel Multi-Scale Spectrogram (MSS) modelling approach to synthesise speech with an improved coarse and fine-grained prosody. We present a generic multi-scale spectrog…