7 papers
Mind the Shift: Using Delta SSL Embeddings to Enhance Child ASR
Zilai Wang, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Kaiyuan Zhang +2
Self-supervised learning (SSL) models have achieved impressive results across many speech tasks, yet child automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited dat…
Comparing Unsupervised and Supervised Semantic Speech Tokens: A Case Study of Child ASR
Mohan Shi, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Kaiyuan Zhang +2
Discrete speech tokens have gained attention for their storage efficiency and integration with Large Language Models (LLMs). They are commonly categorized into acoustic and semanti…
Benchmarking Training Paradigms, Dataset Composition, and Model Scaling for Child ASR in ESPnet
Anyu Ying, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Chyi-Jiunn Lin +7
Despite advancements in ASR, child speech recognition remains challenging due to acoustic variability and limited annotated data. While fine-tuning adult ASR models on child speech…
An Age-Agnostic System for Robust Speaker Verification
Jiusi Zheng, Vishwas Shetty, Natarajan Balaji Shankar +1
In speaker verification (SV), the acoustic mismatch between children's and adults' speech leads to suboptimal performance when adult-trained SV systems are applied to children's sp…
CHSER: A Dataset and Case Study on Generative Speech Error Correction for Child ASR
Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Zilai Wang, Kaiyuan Zhang +2
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems struggle with child speech due to its distinct acoustic and linguistic variability and limited availability of child speech datasets, lea…
Enhancing Age-Related Robustness in Children Speaker Verification
Vishwas M. Shetty, Jiusi Zheng, Steven M. Lulich +1
One of the main challenges in children's speaker verification (C-SV) is the significant change in children's voices as they grow. In this paper, we propose two approaches to improv…