4 papers
Re:Member: Emotional Question Generation from Personal Memories
Zackary Rackauckas, Nobuaki Minematsu, Julia Hirschberg
We present Re:Member, a system that explores how emotionally expressive, memory-grounded interaction can support more engaging second language (L2) learning. By drawing on users' p…
Animating Language Practice: Engagement with Stylized Conversational Agents in Japanese Learning
Zackary Rackauckas, Julia Hirschberg
We explore Jouzu, a Japanese language learning application that integrates large language models with anime-inspired conversational agents. Designed to address challenges learners…
VoxRAG: A Step Toward Transcription-Free RAG Systems in Spoken Question Answering
Zackary Rackauckas, Julia Hirschberg
We introduce VoxRAG, a modular speech-to-speech retrieval-augmented generation system that bypasses transcription to retrieve semantically relevant audio segments directly from spo…
Comparative Evaluation of Expressive Japanese Character Text-to-Speech with VITS and Style-BERT-VITS2
Zackary Rackauckas, Julia Hirschberg
Synthesizing expressive Japanese character speech poses unique challenges due to pitch-accent sensitivity and stylistic variability. This paper empirically evaluates two open-sourc…