5 papers
Natural Language-based Assessment of L2 Oral Proficiency using LLMs
Stefano Bannò, Rao Ma, Mengjie Qian +3
Natural language-based assessment (NLA) is an approach to second language assessment that uses instructions - expressed in the form of can-do descriptors - originally intended for…
Assessment of L2 Oral Proficiency using Speech Large Language Models
Rao Ma, Mengjie Qian, Siyuan Tang +3
The growing population of L2 English speakers has increased the demand for developing automatic graders for spoken language assessment (SLA). Historically, statistical models, text…
Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Speech Translation
Rao Ma, Mengjie Qian, Yassir Fathullah +3
There has been increasing interest in building multilingual foundation models for NLP and speech research. This paper examines how to expand the speech translation capability of th…
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…
Learn and Don't Forget: Adding a New Language to ASR Foundation Models
Mengjie Qian, Siyuan Tang, Rao Ma +2
Foundation ASR models often support many languages, e.g. 100 languages in Whisper. However, there has been limited work on integrating an additional, typically low-resource, langua…