United States

Following the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in NLP tasks, there is increasing interest in extending their capabilities to speech---the most common form of communication. The most widespread approach to integrating speech into LLMs is dense feature prepending (DFP), which prepends the projected speech representations to the textual representations, allowing end-to-end training with a speech encoder. This raises questions about the need for a sophisticated speech encoder for DFP and how its performance compares with a standard encoder-decoder (i.e., cross-attention) architecture. We compare DFP and cross-attention under a variety of configurations, such as CTC compression, sequence-level knowledge distillation, on monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual models. To perform a controlled architectural comparison, we train all models from scratch rather than using large pretrained models and use comparable data and parameter settings, testing speech-to-text recognition (ASR) and translation (ST) on MuST-C v1.0 and CoVoST2 datasets. Despite the wide adoption of DFP, our results do not indicate a clear advantage of DFP over cross-attention.

NAACL 2025

Prepending or Cross-Attention for Speech-to-Text? An Empirical Comparison

prepending

speech language model

speech-to-text

attention

speech recognition

speech translation

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

poster

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We introduce AudioBench, a universal benchmark designed to evaluate Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs). It encompasses 8 distinct tasks and 26 datasets, among which, 7 are newly proposed datasets. The evaluation targets three main aspects: speech understanding, audio scene understanding, and voice understanding (paralinguistic). Despite recent advancements, there lacks a comprehensive benchmark for AudioLLMs on instruction following capabilities conditioned on audio signals. AudioBench addresses this gap by setting up datasets as well as desired evaluation metrics. Besides, we also evaluated the capabilities of five popular models and found that no single model excels consistently across all tasks. We outline the research outlook for AudioLLMs and anticipate that our open-sourced evaluation toolkit, data, and leaderboard will offer a robust testbed for future model developments.

AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Models

Dysarthric speech recognition often suffers from performance degradation due to the intrinsic diversity of dysarthric severity and extrinsic disparity from normal speech. To bridge these gaps, we propose a Dynamic Phoneme-level Contrastive Learning (DyPCL) method, which leads to obtaining invariant representations across diverse speakers. We decompose the speech utterance into phoneme segments for phoneme-level contrastive learning, leveraging dynamic connectionist temporal classification alignment. Unlike prior studies focusing on utterance-level embeddings, our granular learning allows discrimination of subtle parts of speech. In addition, we introduce dynamic curriculum learning, which progressively transitions from easy negative samples to difficult-to-distinguishable negative samples based on phonetic similarity of phoneme. Our approach to training by difficulty levels alleviates the inherent variability of speakers, better identifying challenging speeches. Evaluated on the UASpeech dataset, DyPCL outperforms baseline models, achieving an average 22.10% relative reduction in word error rate (WER) across the overall dysarthria group.

DyPCL: Dynamic Phoneme-level Contrastive Learning for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

Spontaneous or conversational multilingual speech presents many challenges for state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this work, we present a new technique AMPS, that augments a multilingual multimodal ASR system with paraphrase-based supervision for improved conversational ASR in multiple languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, and Nyanja. We use paraphrases of the reference transcriptions as additional supervision while training the multimodal ASR model and selectively invoke this paraphrase objective for utterances with poor ASR performance. Using AMPS with a state-of-the-art multimodal model SeamlessM4T, we obtain significant relative reductions in word error rates (WERs) of up to 5%. We present detailed analyses of our system using both objective and human evaluation metrics.

AMPS: ASR with Multimodal Paraphrase Supervision

Recent studies have augmented large language models (LLMs) with speech capabilities, leading to the development of speech language models (SpeechLMs). Earlier SpeechLMs focused on single-turn speech-based question answering (QA), where user input comprised a speech context and a text question. More recent studies have extended this to multi-turn conversations, though they often require complex, multi-stage supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with diverse data. Another critical challenge with SpeechLMs is catastrophic forgetting, where models optimized for speech tasks suffer significant degradation in text-only performance. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel single-stage joint speech-text SFT approach on the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) of the LLM backbone. Our joint SFT combines text-only SFT data with three types of speech-related data: speech recognition and translation, speech-based QA, and mixed-modal SFT. Compared to previous SpeechLMs with 7B or 13B parameters, our 3B model demonstrates superior performance across various speech benchmarks while preserving the original capabilities on text-only tasks. Furthermore, our model shows emergent abilities of effectively handling previously unseen prompts and tasks, including multi-turn, mixed-modal inputs.

VoiceTextBlender: Augmenting Large Language Models with Speech Capabilities via Single-Stage Joint Speech-Text Supervised Fine-Tuning

While recent zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) models achieve impressive results, they typically rely on extensive transcribed speech datasets from numerous speakers and intricate training pipelines. Meanwhile, self-supervised learning (SSL) speech features have emerged as effective intermediate representations for TTS. Further, SSL features from different speakers that are linearly close share phonetic information while maintaining individual speaker identity. In this study, we introduce kNN-TTS, a simple and effective framework for zero-shot multi-speaker TTS using retrieval methods which leverage the linear relationships between SSL features. Objective and subjective evaluations show that our models, trained on transcribed speech from a single speaker only, achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art models that are trained on significantly larger training datasets. The low training data requirements mean that kNN-TTS is well suited for the development of multi-speaker TTS systems for low-resource domains and languages. We also introduce an interpolation parameter which enables fine-grained voice morphing. Demo samples are available at https://idiap.github.io/knn-tts .

kNN Retrieval for Simple and Effective Zero-Shot Multi-speaker Text-to-Speech

Emotional dialogue speech synthesis (EDSS) aims to generate expressive speech by leveraging the dialogue context between interlocutors. This is typically done by concatenating global representations of previous utterances as conditions for text-to-speech (TTS) systems. However, such approaches overlook the importance of integrating localized acoustic cues that convey emotion. To address this, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes a large language model (LLM) to generate holistic emotion tags based on prior dialogue context, while also pinpointing key words in the target utterance that align with the predicted emotional state. Furthermore, we enhance the emotional richness of synthesized speech by incorporating concentrated acoustic features of these key words through a novel selective audio masking loss function. This methodology not only improves emotional expressiveness, but also facilitates automatic emotion speech generation during inference by eliminating the need for manual emotion tag selection. Comprehensive subjective and objective evaluations and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Prompt-Guided Selective Masking Loss for Context-Aware Emotive Text-to-Speech

The fusion of speech and language in the era of large language models has garnered significant attention. Discrete speech token is often utilized in text-to-speech tasks for speech compression and portability, which is convenient for joint training with text and have good compression efficiency. However, we found that the discrete speech tokenizer still suffers from information loss. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective continuous speech tokenizer named Cont-SPT, and a text-to-speech model based on continuous speech tokens. Our results show that the speech language model based on the continuous speech tokenizer has better continuity and higher estimated Mean Opinion Scores (MoS). This enhancement is attributed to better information preservation rate of the continuous speech tokenizer across both low and high frequencies in the frequency domain. The code and resources for Cont-SPT can be found in https://github.com/Yixing-Li/Continuous-Speech-Tokenizer.

Continuous Speech Tokenizer in Text To Speech

This paper conducts a comprehensive layer-wise analysis of self-supervised learning (SSL) models for audio deepfake detection across diverse contexts, including multilingual datasets (English, Chinese, Spanish), partial, song, and scene-based deepfake scenarios. By systematically evaluating the contributions of different transformer layers, we uncover critical insights into model behavior and performance. Our findings reveal that lower layers consistently provide the most discriminative features, while higher layers capture less relevant information. Notably, all models achieve competitive equal error rate (EER) scores even when employing a reduced number of layers. This indicates that we can reduce computational costs and increase the inference speed of detecting deepfakes by utilizing only a few lower layers. This work enhances our understanding of SSL models in deepfake detection, offering valuable insights applicable across varied linguistic and contextual settings. Our models and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Yaselley/SSL_Layerwise_Deepfake.

Comprehensive Layer-wise Analysis of SSL Models for Audio Deepfake Detection

This paper introduces BnTTS (Bangla Text-To-Speech), the first framework for Bangla speaker adaptation-based TTS, designed to bridge the gap in Bangla speech synthesis using minimal training data. Building upon the XTTS architecture, our approach integrates Bangla into a multilingual TTS pipeline, with modifications to account for the phonetic and linguistic characteristics of the language. We pretrain BnTTS on 3.85k hours of Bangla speech dataset with corresponding text labels and evaluate performance in both zero-shot and few-shot settings on our proposed test dataset. Empirical evaluations in few-shot settings show that BnTTS significantly improves the naturalness, intelligibility, and speaker fidelity of synthesized Bangla speech. Compared to state-of-the-art Bangla TTS systems, BnTTS exhibits superior performance in Subjective Mean Opinion Score (SMOS), Naturalness, and Clarity metrics.

BnTTS: Few-Shot Speaker Adaptation in Low-Resource Setting

Speech recognition performance varies by language, domain, and speaker characteristics such as accent, but fine-tuning a model on any of these categories may lead to catastrophic forgetting. Token-level k nearest neighbor search (kNN), first proposed for neural sequence decoders for natural language generation (NLG) and machine translation (MT), is a non-parametric method that instead adapts using inference-time search in an external datastore, without training the underlying model. We show that Whisper, a transformer end-to-end speech model, benefits from kNN. We investigate the differences between the speech and text setups. We discuss implications for speaker adaptation, and analyze improvements by gender, accent, and age.

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Next from NAACL 2025

AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Models

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Unified Speech-Text Pre-training for Speech Translation and Recognition