Sara Ahmed

Juan Zuluaga-Gomez, Sara Ahmed, Danielius Visockas et al.

Despite the recent advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), the recognition of accented speech still remains a dominant problem. In order to create more inclusive ASR systems, research has shown that the integration of accent information, as part of a larger ASR framework, can lead to the mitigation of accented speech errors. We address multilingual accent classification through the ECAPA-TDNN and Wav2Vec 2.0/XLSR architectures which have been proven to perform well on a variety of speech-related downstream tasks. We introduce a simple-to-follow recipe aligned to the SpeechBrain toolkit for accent classification based on Common Voice 7.0 (English) and Common Voice 11.0 (Italian, German, and Spanish). Furthermore, we establish new state-of-the-art for English accent classification with as high as 95% accuracy. We also study the internal categorization of the Wav2Vev 2.0 embeddings through t-SNE, noting that there is a level of clustering based on phonological similarity. (Our recipe is open-source in the SpeechBrain toolkit, see: https://github.com/speechbrain/speechbrain/tree/develop/recipes)

Abdulhady Abas Abdullah, Sarkhel H. Taher Karim, Sara Azad Ahmed et al.

Speaker diarization is a fundamental task in speech processing that involves dividing an audio stream by speaker. Although state-of-the-art models have advanced performance in high-resource languages, low-resource languages such as Kurdish pose unique challenges due to limited annotated data, multiple dialects and frequent code-switching. In this study, we address these issues by training the Wav2Vec 2.0 self-supervised learning model on a dedicated Kurdish corpus. By leveraging transfer learning, we adapted multilingual representations learned from other languages to capture the phonetic and acoustic characteristics of Kurdish speech. Relative to a baseline method, our approach reduced the diarization error rate by seven point two percent and improved cluster purity by thirteen percent. These findings demonstrate that enhancements to existing models can significantly improve diarization performance for under-resourced languages. Our work has practical implications for developing transcription services for Kurdish-language media and for speaker segmentation in multilingual call centers, teleconferencing and video-conferencing systems. The results establish a foundation for building effective diarization systems in other understudied languages, contributing to greater equity in speech technology.

Ahmed Ibrahim, Ayman El-Refai, Sara Ahmed et al.

Due to the mass advancement in ubiquitous technologies nowadays, new pervasive methods have come into the practice to provide new innovative features and stimulate the research on new human-computer interactions. This paper presents a hand gesture recognition method that utilizes the smartphone's built-in speakers and microphones. The proposed system emits an ultrasonic sonar-based signal (inaudible sound) from the smartphone's stereo speakers, which is then received by the smartphone's microphone and processed via a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for Hand Gesture Recognition. Data augmentation techniques are proposed to improve the detection accuracy and three dual-channel input fusion methods are compared. The first method merges the dual-channel audio as a single input spectrogram image. The second method adopts early fusion by concatenating the dual-channel spectrograms. The third method adopts late fusion by having two convectional input branches processing each of the dual-channel spectrograms and then the outputs are merged by the last layers. Our experimental results demonstrate a promising detection accuracy for the six gestures presented in our publicly available dataset with an accuracy of 93.58\% as a baseline.