Organizations: Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan · NTT, Inc., Japan
Abstract
Recent Phonetic Foundation Models (PFMs) for Speech-to-IPA transcription rely on Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) labels, but the phoneme labels are not necessarily phonetically faithful. To investigate this issue, we evaluate zero-shot phonetic classification on Chinese aspiration and Japanese moraic nasals. A PFM trained on G2P-labeled data excluding these two languages yields poor accuracy on both tasks, showing that multilingual coverage with discrete IPA tokens is not sufficient for unseen settings. To overcome this limitation, we propose a classification method based on continuous Articulatory Feature (AF) vectors extracted from each frame. This AF-based approach outperforms discrete token-based methods, particularly for rare phones. We further show that it is crucial to adopt the optimal temporal aggregation of AF vectors for the target distinction: single-frame classification is best for aspiration, while segmental classification substantially improves nasal classification.
Zero-shot cross-lingual phoneme recognition is often hindered by the fragility of direct acoustic-to-symbol mapping, which is susceptible to language-specific variations. Echoing joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) work in vision, we propose ArtNet, a framework that explores a structured feature prediction task based on articulatory features to enhance acoustic robustness. Specifically, ArtNet integrates an articulatory predictor, designed to extract universal articulatory representations from self-supervised learning (SSL) features, with a variational information bottleneck (VIB) to suppress language-specific variations. Experiments on seven unseen languages demonstrate that ArtNet, particularly when synergized with the proposed vector-space inventory alignment (VSIA) strategy, significantly outperforms competitive baselines, achieving a 20.56% relative reduction in phoneme error rate (PER) and 7.01% in phoneme feature error rate (PFER).
Phonological features provide a language-general and linguistically grounded representation of speech. We present PhonoQ-2.0, a multilingual frame-level phonological feature recognizer built on self-supervised speech models. The system directly predicts a structured 22-dimensional feature vector per frame encoding manner, vowel quality, place, and voicing, instead of deriving features from phoneme outputs. To ensure phonologically coherent predictions, we introduce a manner-conditioned gating mechanism that activates valid feature groups. Evaluated across multiple languages and corpora, PhonoQ-2.0 achieves an average macro-F1 of 91.3% in-domain and 88.9% out-of-domain. Compared to a strong CTC phoneme baseline, it delivers consistent gains of +8.8 F1 in-domain and +8.6 out-of-domain on average. In unseen-language evaluation, PhonoQ-2.0 improves macro-F1 from 66.9% to 73.6% (+6.7 on average), with gains of up to +10.8 points.
Abner Hernandez, Tomás Arias-Vergara, Daiqi Liu +2
Large audio and language models have recently demonstrated zero-shot reasoning capabilities across various domains. However, it remains unclear how the form of audio input, whether handcrafted acoustic features extracted from speech or the raw audio waveform itself, affects performance for Parkinson's disease (PD) detection across different languages. In this study, we systematically compare two input modalities for zero-shot PD detection: (i) handcrafted acoustic features extracted from speech recordings analyzed by a general-purpose LLM, and (ii) direct waveform input analyzed by audio-capable models. Experiments on PD speech datasets in four languages show that performance varies across input modalities, speech tasks, and languages. Handcrafted acoustic features provide more stable performance in a low-resource language (e.g., Bengali), whereas audio input yields dataset-dependent gains. These findings highlight the impact of input modality on zero-shot PD detection from speech.