Minghui Dong

Andreea I. Niculescu, Jochen Ehnes, Minghui Dong

Aphasia, a language impairment primarily resulting from stroke or brain injury, profoundly disrupts communication and everyday functioning. Despite advances in speech therapy, barriers such as limited therapist availability and the scarcity of personalized, culturally relevant tools continue to hinder optimal rehabilitation outcomes. This paper reviews recent developments in neurocognitive research and language technologies that contribute to the diagnosis and therapy of aphasia. Drawing on findings from our ethnographic field study, we introduce two digital therapy prototypes designed to reflect local linguistic diversity and enhance patient engagement. We also show how insights from neuroscience and the local context guided the design of these tools to better meet patient and therapist needs. Our work highlights the potential of adaptive, AI-enhanced assistive technologies to complement conventional therapy and broaden access to therapy. We conclude by outlining future research directions for advancing personalized and scalable aphasia rehabilitation.

Kangxiang Xia, Dake Guo, Jixun Yao et al.

The ISCSLP 2024 Conversational Voice Clone (CoVoC) Challenge aims to benchmark and advance zero-shot spontaneous style voice cloning, particularly focusing on generating spontaneous behaviors in conversational speech. The challenge comprises two tracks: an unconstrained track without limitation on data and model usage, and a constrained track only allowing the use of constrained open-source datasets. A 100-hour high-quality conversational speech dataset is also made available with the challenge. This paper details the data, tracks, submitted systems, evaluation results, and findings.

Dongdong Yu, Kai Su, Hengkai Guo et al.

Semi-supervised video object segmentation is an interesting yet challenging task in machine learning. In this work, we conduct a series of refinements with the propagation-based video object segmentation method and empirically evaluate their impact on the final model performance through ablation study. By taking all the refinements, we improve the space-time memory networks to achieve a Overall of 79.1 on the Youtube-VOS Challenge 2019.

Fugen Zhou, Fuxiang Wu, Zhengchen Zhang et al.

This paper presents a novel reranking model, future reward reranking, to re-score the actions in a transition-based parser by using a global scorer. Different to conventional reranking parsing, the model searches for the best dependency tree in all feasible trees constraining by a sequence of actions to get the future reward of the sequence. The scorer is based on a first-order graph-based parser with bidirectional LSTM, which catches different parsing view compared with the transition-based parser. Besides, since context enhancement has shown substantial improvement in the arc-stand transition-based parsing over the parsing accuracy, we implement context enhancement on an arc-eager transition-base parser with stack LSTMs, the dynamic oracle and dropout supporting and achieve further improvement. With the global scorer and context enhancement, the results show that UAS of the parser increases as much as 1.20% for English and 1.66% for Chinese, and LAS increases as much as 1.32% for English and 1.63% for Chinese. Moreover, we get state-of-the-art LASs, achieving 87.58% for Chinese and 93.37% for English.

Hy Quy Nguyen, Siu Wa Lee, Xiaohai Tian et al.

Voice conversion methods have advanced rapidly over the last decade. Studies have shown that speaker characteristics are captured by spectral feature as well as various prosodic features. Most existing conversion methods focus on the spectral feature as it directly represents the timbre characteristics, while some conversion methods have focused only on the prosodic feature represented by the fundamental frequency. In this paper, a comprehensive framework using deep neural networks to convert both timbre and prosodic features is proposed. The timbre feature is represented by a high-resolution spectral feature. The prosodic features include F0, intensity and duration. It is well known that DNN is useful as a tool to model high-dimensional features. In this work, we show that DNN initialized by our proposed autoencoder pretraining yields good quality DNN conversion models. This pretraining is tailor-made for voice conversion and leverages on autoencoder to capture the generic spectral shape of source speech. Additionally, our framework uses segmental DNN models to capture the evolution of the prosodic features over time. To reconstruct the converted speech, the spectral feature produced by the DNN model is combined with the three prosodic features produced by the DNN segmental models. Our experimental results show that the application of both prosodic and high-resolution spectral features leads to quality converted speech as measured by objective evaluation and subjective listening tests.

Bo Fan, Siu Wa Lee, Xiaohai Tian et al.

State-of-the-art statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) generally uses a vocoder to represent speech signals and parameterize them into features for subsequent modeling. Magnitude spectrum has been a dominant feature over the years. Although perceptual studies have shown that phase spectrum is essential to the quality of synthesized speech, it is often ignored by using a minimum phase filter during synthesis and the speech quality suffers. To bypass this bottleneck in vocoded speech, this paper proposes a phase-embedded waveform representation framework and establishes a magnitude-phase joint modeling platform for high-quality SPSS. Our experiments on waveform reconstruction show that the performance is better than that of the widely-used STRAIGHT. Furthermore, the proposed modeling and synthesis platform outperforms a leading-edge, vocoded, deep bidirectional long short-term memory recurrent neural network (DBLSTM-RNN)-based baseline system in various objective evaluation metrics conducted.