9 accepted papers
Grammatical feedback is crucial for L2 learners, teachers, and testers. Spoken grammatical error correction (GEC) aims to supply feedback to L2 learners on their use of grammar when speaking. This process usually relies on a cascaded pipeline comprising an ASR system, disfluency removal, and GEC, wi…
A significant concern with deep learning based approaches is that they are difficult to interpret, which means detecting bias in network predictions can be challenging. Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs) have been proposed to address this problem. These use representations - perturbations of activati…
Automatic language assessment and learning systems are required to support the global growth in English language learning. They need to be able to provide reliable and meaningful feedback to help learners develop their skills. This paper considers the question of detecting "grammatical" errors in no…
Word units are a popular choice in statistical language modelling. For inflective and agglutinative languages this choice may result in a high out of vocabulary rate. Subword units, such as morphs, provide an interesting alternative to words. These units can be derived in an unsupervised fashion and…
Recurrent neural network language models (RNNLMs) have becoming increasingly popular in many applications such as automatic speech recognition (ASR). Significant performance improvements in both perplexity and word error rate over standard n-gram LMs have been widely reported on ASR tasks. In contra…
Training neural network acoustic models on limited quantities of data is a challenging task. A number of techniques have been proposed to improve generalisation. This paper investigates one such technique called stimulated training. It enables standard criteria such as cross-entropy to enforce spati…
The number of languages for which speech recognition systems have become available is growing each year. This paper proposes to view languages as points in some rich space, termed language space, where bases are eigen-languages and a particular selection of the projection determines points. Such an…
This paper introduces a method to produce high-quality transcriptions of speech data from only two crowd-sourced transcriptions. These transcriptions, produced cheaply by people on the Internet, for example through Amazon Mechanical Turk, are often of low quality. Often, multiple crowd-sourced trans…
Large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems require a mapping from words, or tokens, into sub-word units to enable robust estimation of acoustic model parameters, and to model words not seen in the training data. The standard approach to achieve this is to manually generate a lexicon wher…