VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Siddhant Arora
dblp:235/7362
· DBLP profile ↗
45ranked-venue papers
12as first author
44since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0006-4589-1611ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 36 · 9 first-author · 36 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 32 · 8 first-author · 31 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | TMT: Tri-Modal Translation Between Speech, Image, and Text by Processing Different Modalities as Different LanguagesabstractThe capability to jointly process multi-modal information is becoming essential. However, the development of multi-modal learning is hindered by the substantial computational requirements and the limited availability of paired multi-modal data. We propose a novel Tri-Modal Translation (TMT) model that translates between arbitrary modalities spanning speech, image, and text. We introduce a simple yet efficient and effective approach, treating speech and image modalities as discrete text modality and approaching multi-modal translation as a well-established machine translation problem. To this end, we tokenize speech and image data into discrete tokens, resulting in a significant reduction in computational cost. Furthermore, by incorporating back translation into multi-modal translation, unpaired data can also be utilized for training. TMT can perform six modality translation tasks and consistently outperforms its single-model counterparts. TMT significantly reduces the required data size (in bits) for training, to approximately 0.2% for speech data and 0.04% for image data, respectively. Minsu Kim 0001, Jee-Weon Jung, Hyeongseop Rha, Soumi Maiti, Siddhant Arora, Xuankai Chang, Shinji Watanabe 0001, Yong Man Ro |
IEEE Trans. Multim. | 5 |
| 2025 | AURA: Agent for Understanding, Reasoning, and Automated Tool Use in Voice-Driven TasksabstractDespite advances in language and speech technologies, no open-source system enables full speech-to-speech, multiturn dialogue with integrated tool use and agentic reasoning. We introduce AURA (Agent for Understanding, Reasoning, and Automated Tool Use), the first open-source, speech-native assistant capable of completing complex, goal-driven tasks through dynamic tool invocation and multi-turn conversation. AURA combines open-weight ASR, TTS, and LLMs in a cascaded pipeline and supports tools such as calendar booking, contact lookup, web search, and email. Its modular design allows easy integration of new tools using natural language prompts and action classes. On VoiceBench, AURA scores $92.75 \%$ on Open-BookQA—outperforming all open-weight systems and nearing GPT-4o—and 4.39 on AlpacaEval, competitive with other openweight systems. Human evaluation shows $90 \%$ task success on complex, multi-turn speech tasks. Leander Melroy Maben, Gayathri Ganesh Lakshmy, Srijith Radhakrishnan, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ASRU | 4 |
| 2025 | VERSA-v2: A Modular and Scalable Toolkit for Speech and Audio Evaluation with Expanded Metrics, Visualization, and LLM IntegrationabstractWe present VERSA-v2, a major upgrade of the Versatile Evaluation of Speech and Audio (VERSA) toolkit for standardized and scalable evaluation across speech, audio, and music tasks. It features a modular, object-oriented architecture that simplifies metric integration and now supports over 100 metrics, organized into curated task-specific packs. VERSA-v2 also introduces interactive visualizations, per-metric profiling, and prompt-based evaluation using both text- and audio-based large language models (LLMs). These advancements make VERSA-v2 a robust, extensible, and LLM-enabled platform for comprehensive and interpretable speech and audio evaluation. Jiatong Shi, Bo-Hao Su, Shikhar Bharadwaj, Shih-Heng Wang, Jionghao Hang, Wei Wang 0010, Wenhao Feng, Yuxun Tang, Nezih Topaloglu, Siddhant Arora, Jinchuan Tian, Hye-Jin Shim, Wangyou Zhang, Wen-Chin Huang, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ASRU | 12 |
| 2025 | Spiralformer: Low Latency Encoder for Streaming Speech Recognition with Circular Layer Skipping and Early ExitingabstractFor streaming speech recognition, a Transformerbased encoder has been widely used with block processing. Although many studies addressed improving emission latency of transducers, little work has been explored for improving encoding latency of the block processing. We seek to reduce latency by frequently emitting a chunk with a small shift rather than scarce large-chunk emissions, resulting in higher computational costs. To efficiently compute with the small chunk shift, we propose a new encoder, Spiralformer, tailored for block processing by combining layer dropping and early exiting. We skip layer computation in a cyclic manner and shift the computed layer in each block spirally, which completes computation for all the layers over the block processing. Experimentally, we observed that our method achieved 21.6% reduction in the averaged token emission delay in Librispeech, and 7.0% in CSJ, compared with the baseline with similar computational cost and word error rates. Emiru Tsunoo, Hayato Futami, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ASRU | 4 |
| 2025 | Hypothesis Clustering and Merging: Novel MultiTalker Speech Recognition with Speaker TokensabstractIn many real-world scenarios, such as meetings, multiple speakers are present with an unknown number of participants, and their utterances often overlap. We address these multi-speaker challenges by a novel attention-based encoder-decoder method augmented with special speaker class tokens obtained by speaker clustering. During inference, we select multiple recognition hypotheses conditioned on predicted speaker cluster tokens, and these hypotheses are merged by agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) based on the normalized edit distance. The clustered hypotheses result in the multi-speaker transcriptions with the appropriate number of speakers determined by AHC. Our experiments on the LibriMix dataset demonstrate that our proposed method was particularly effective in complex 3-mix environments, achieving a 55% relative error reduction on clean data and a 36% relative error reduction on noisy data compared with conventional serialized output training. Yosuke Kashiwagi, Hayato Futami, Emiru Tsunoo, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ICASSP | 4 |
| 2025 | Talking Turns: Benchmarking Audio Foundation Models on Turn-Taking DynamicsabstractThe recent wave of audio foundation models (FMs) could provide new capabilities for conversational modeling. However, there have been limited efforts to evaluate these audio FMs comprehensively on their ability to have natural and interactive conversations. To engage in meaningful conversation with the end user, we would want the FMs to additionally perform a fluent succession of turns without too much overlapping speech or long stretches of silence. Inspired by this, we ask whether the recently proposed audio FMs can understand, predict, and perform turn-taking events? To answer this, we propose a novel evaluation protocol that can assess spoken dialog system's turn-taking capabilities using a supervised model as a judge that has been trained to predict turn-taking events in human-human conversations. Using this protocol, we present the first comprehensive user study that evaluates existing spoken dialogue systems on their ability to perform turn-taking events and reveal many interesting insights, such as they sometimes do not understand when to speak up, can interrupt too aggressively and rarely backchannel. We further evaluate multiple open-source and proprietary audio FMs accessible through APIs on carefully curated test benchmarks from Switchboard to measure their ability to understand and predict turn-taking events and identify significant room for improvement. We will open source our evaluation platform to promote the development of advanced conversational AI systems. Siddhant Arora, Zhiyun Lu, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Ruoming Pang, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2025 | Context-aware Dynamic Pruning for Speech Foundation ModelsabstractFoundation models, such as large language models, have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing and are evolving into models capable of handling multiple modalities.
Listening ability, in particular, is crucial for many applications, leading to research on building speech foundation models. However, the high computational cost of these large models presents a significant challenge for real-world applications. Although substantial efforts have been made to reduce computational costs, such as through pruning techniques, the majority of these approaches are applied primarily during the training phase for specific downstream tasks. In this study, we hypothesize that optimal pruned networks may vary based on contextual factors such as speaker characteristics, languages, and tasks. To address this, we propose a dynamic pruning technique that adapts to these contexts during inference without altering the underlying model. We demonstrated that we could successfully reduce inference time by approximately 30\% while maintaining accuracy in multilingual/multi-task scenarios. We also found that the obtained pruned structure offers meaningful interpretations based on the context, e.g., task-related information emerging as the dominant factor for efficient pruning. Masao Someki, Yifan Peng 0003, Siddhant Arora, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Grant P. Strimel, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2025 | Chain-of-Thought Training for Open E2E Spoken Dialogue Systems
Siddhant Arora, Jinchuan Tian, Hayato Futami, Jee-Weon Jung, Jiatong Shi, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Emiru Tsunoo, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 1 |
| 2025 | Scheduled Interleaved Speech-Text Training for Speech-to-Speech Translation with LLMs
Hayato Futami, Emiru Tsunoo, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Hassan Shahmohammadi, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 6 |
| 2025 | Scalable Spontaneous Speech Dataset (SSSD): Crowdsourcing Data Collection to Promote Dialogue Research
Zaid Sheikh, Shuichiro Shimizu, Siddhant Arora, Jiatong Shi, Samuele Cornell, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 3 |
| 2025 | OpusLM: A Family of Open Unified Speech Language Models
Jinchuan Tian, Yifan Peng 0003, Jiatong Shi, Siddhant Arora, Shikhar Bharadwaj, Takashi Maekaku, Yusuke Shinohara, Keita Goto, Xiang Yue, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 5 |
| 2025 | AHa-Bench: Benchmarking Audio Hallucinations in Large Audio-Language ModelsabstractHallucinations present a significant challenge in the development and evaluation of large language models (LLMs), directly affecting their reliability and accuracy. While notable advancements have been made in research on textual and visual hallucinations, there is still a lack of a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating auditory hallucinations in large audio language models (LALMs). To fill this gap, we introduce AHa-Bench, a systematic and comprehensive benchmark for audio hallucinations. Audio data, in particular, uniquely combines the multi-attribute complexity of visual data with the semantic richness of textual data, leading to auditory hallucinations that share characteristics with both visual and textual hallucinations. Based on the source of these hallucinations, AHa-Bench categorizes them into semantic hallucinations, acoustic hallucinations, and semantic-acoustic confusion hallucinations. In addition, we systematically evaluate seven open-source local perception language models (LALMs), demonstrating the challenges these models face in audio understanding, especially when it comes to jointly understanding semantic and acoustic information. Through the development of a comprehensive evaluation framework, AHa-Bench aims to enhance the robustness and stability of LALMs, fostering more reliable and nuanced audio understanding in LALMs. The benchmark dataset is available at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/ahabench/AHa-Bench}. Xize Cheng, Chenyuhao Wen, Shannon Yu, Zehan Wang 0001, Shengpeng Ji, Siddhant Arora, Tao Jin 0004, Shinji Watanabe 0001, Zhou Zhao 0001 |
NeurIPS | 7 |
| 2025 | ARECHO: Autoregressive Evaluation via Chain-Based Hypothesis Optimization for Speech Multi-Metric EstimationabstractSpeech signal analysis poses significant challenges, particularly in tasks such as speech quality evaluation and profiling, where the goal is to predict multiple perceptual and objective metrics. For instance, metrics like PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality), STOI (Short-Time Objective Intelligibility), and MOS (Mean Opinion Score) each capture different aspects of speech quality. However, these metrics often have different scales, assumptions, and dependencies, making joint estimation non-trivial. To address these issues, we introduce ARECHO (Autoregressive Evaluation via Chain-based Hypothesis Optimization), a chain-based, versatile evaluation system for speech assessment grounded in autoregressive dependency modeling. ARECHO is distinguished by three key innovations: (1) a comprehensive speech information tokenization pipeline; (2) a dynamic classifier chain that explicitly captures inter-metric dependencies; and (3) a two-step confidence-oriented decoding algorithm that enhances inference reliability. Experiments demonstrate that ARECHO significantly outperforms the baseline framework across diverse evaluation scenarios, including enhanced speech analysis, speech generation evaluation, and noisy speech evaluation. Furthermore, its dynamic dependency modeling improves interpretability by capturing inter-metric relationships. Across tasks, ARECHO offers reference-free evaluation using its dynamic classifier chain to support subset queries (single or multiple metrics) and reduces error propagation via confidence-oriented decoding. Jiatong Shi, Bo-Hao Su, Hye-Jin Shim, Jinchuan Tian, Samuele Cornell, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
NeurIPS | 8 |
| 2024 | Creation and Analysis of an International Corpus of Privacy LawsabstractThe landscape of privacy laws and regulations around the world is complex and ever-changing. National and super-national laws, agreements, decrees, and other government-issued rules form a patchwork that companies must follow to operate internationally. To examine the status and evolution of this patchwork, we introduce the Privacy Law Corpus, of 1,043 privacy laws, regulations, and guidelines, covering 183 jurisdictions. This corpus enables a large-scale quantitative and qualitative examination of legal focus on privacy. We examine the temporal distribution of when privacy laws were created and illustrate the dramatic increase in privacy legislation over the past 50 years, although a finer-grained examination reveals that the rate of increase varies depending on the personal data types that privacy laws address. Our exploration also demonstrates that most privacy laws respectively address relatively few personal data types. Additionally, topic modeling results show the prevalence of common themes in privacy laws, such as finance, healthcare, and telecommunications. Finally, we release the corpus to the research community to promote further study. Sonu Gupta, Geetika Gopi, Harish Balaji, Ellen Poplavska, Nora O'Toole, Siddhant Arora, Thomas B. Norton, Norman M. Sadeh, Shomir Wilson |
LREC/COLING | 6 |
| 2024 | Semi-Autoregressive Streaming ASR with Label ContextabstractNon-autoregressive (NAR) modeling has gained significant interest in speech processing since these models achieve dramatically lower inference time than autoregressive (AR) models while also achieving good transcription accuracy. Since NAR automatic speech recognition (ASR) models must wait for the completion of the entire utterance before processing, some works explore streaming NAR models based on blockwise attention for low-latency applications. However, streaming NAR models significantly lag in accuracy compared to streaming AR and non-streaming NAR models. To address this, we propose a streaming "semi-autoregressive" ASR model that incorporates the labels emitted in previous blocks as additional context using a Language Model (LM) subnetwork. We also introduce a novel greedy decoding algorithm that addresses insertion and deletion errors near block boundaries while not significantly increasing the inference time. Experiments show that our method outperforms the existing streaming NAR model by 19% relative on Tedlium2, 16%/8% on Librispeech-100 clean/other test sets, and 19%/8% on the Switchboard(SWB)/Callhome(CH) test sets. It also reduced the accuracy gap with streaming AR and non-streaming NAR models while achieving 2.5x lower latency. We also demonstrate that our approach can effectively utilize external text data to pre-train the LM subnetwork to further improve streaming ASR accuracy. Siddhant Arora, George Saon, Shinji Watanabe 0001, Brian Kingsbury |
ICASSP | 1 |
| 2024 | Phoneme-Aware Encoding for Prefix-Tree-Based Contextual ASRabstractIn speech recognition applications, it is important to recognize context-specific rare words, such as proper nouns. Tree-constrained Pointer Generator (TCPGen) has shown promise for this purpose, which efficiently biases such words with a prefix tree. While the original TCPGen relies on grapheme-based encoding, we propose extending it with phoneme-aware encoding to better recognize words of unusual pronunciations. As TCPGen handles biasing words as subword units, we propose obtaining subword-level phoneme-aware encoding by using alignment between phonemes and subwords. Furthermore, we propose injecting phoneme-level predictions from CTC into queries of TCPGen so that the model better interprets the phoneme-aware encodings. We conducted ASR experiments with TCPGen for RNN transducer. We observed that proposed phoneme-aware encoding outperformed ordinary grapheme-based encoding on both the English LibriSpeech and Japanese CSJ datasets, demonstrating the robustness of our approach across linguistically diverse languages. Hayato Futami, Emiru Tsunoo, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Hiroaki Ogawa, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ICASSP | 5 |
| 2024 | Dynamic-Superb: Towards a Dynamic, Collaborative, and Comprehensive Instruction-Tuning Benchmark For SpeechabstractText language models have shown remarkable zero-shot capability in generalizing to unseen tasks when provided with well-formulated instructions. However, existing studies in speech processing primarily focus on limited or specific tasks. Moreover, the lack of standardized benchmarks hinders a fair comparison across different approaches. Thus, we present Dynamic-SUPERB, a benchmark designed for building universal speech models capable of leveraging instruction tuning to perform multiple tasks in a zero-shot fashion. To achieve comprehensive coverage of diverse speech tasks and harness instruction tuning, we invite the community to collaborate and contribute, facilitating the dynamic growth of the benchmark. To initiate, Dynamic-SUPERB features 55 evaluation instances by combining 33 tasks and 22 datasets. This spans a broad spectrum of dimensions, providing a comprehensive platform for evaluation. Additionally, we propose several approaches to establish benchmark baselines. These include the utilization of speech models, text language models, and the multimodal encoder. Evaluation results indicate that while these baselines perform reasonably on seen tasks, they struggle with unseen ones. We release all materials to the public and welcome researchers to collaborate on the project, advancing technologies in the field together1. Chien-Yu Huang, Ke-Han Lu, Shih-Heng Wang, Chi-Yuan Hsiao, Chun-Yi Kuan, Siddhant Arora, Kai-Wei Chang 0001, Jiatong Shi, Yifan Peng 0003, Roshan S. Sharma, Shinji Watanabe 0001, Bhiksha Raj, Shady Shehata, Hung-yi Lee |
ICASSP | 7 |
| 2024 | Finding Task-specific Subnetworks in Multi-task Spoken Language Understanding Model
Hayato Futami, Siddhant Arora, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Emiru Tsunoo, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 2 |
| 2024 | To what extent can ASV systems naturally defend against spoofing attacks?
Jee-Weon Jung, Xin Wang 0037, Nicholas W. D. Evans, Shinji Watanabe 0001, Hye-Jin Shim, Hemlata Tak, Siddhant Arora, Junichi Yamagishi, Joon Son Chung |
INTERSPEECH | 7 |
| 2024 | Rapid Language Adaptation for Multilingual E2E Speech Recognition Using Encoder Prompting
Yosuke Kashiwagi, Hayato Futami, Emiru Tsunoo, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 4 |
| 2024 | OWSM v3.1: Better and Faster Open Whisper-Style Speech Models based on E-Branchformer
Yifan Peng 0003, Jinchuan Tian, Siddhant Arora, Brian Yan, Yui Sudo, Muhammad Shakeel 0001, Kwanghee Choi, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Jee-Weon Jung, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 4 |
| 2024 | Decoder-only Architecture for Streaming End-to-end Speech Recognition
Emiru Tsunoo, Hayato Futami, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 4 |
| 2024 | UniverSLU: Universal Spoken Language Understanding for Diverse Tasks with Natural Language InstructionsabstractSiddhant Arora, Hayato Futami, Jee-weon Jung, Yifan Peng, Roshan Sharma, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Emiru Tsunoo, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024. Siddhant Arora, Hayato Futami, Jee-Weon Jung, Yifan Peng 0003, Roshan S. Sharma, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Emiru Tsunoo, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
NAACL-HLT | 1 |
| 2024 | ESPnet-EZ: Python-Only ESPnet For Easy Fine-Tuning And IntegrationabstractWe introduce ESPnet-EZ, an extension of the open-source speech processing toolkit ESPnet, aimed at quick and easy development of speech models. ESPnet-EZ focuses on two major aspects: (i) easy fine-tuning and inference of existing ESPnet models on various tasks and (ii) easy integration with popular deep neural network frameworks such as PyTorch-Lightning, Hugging Face transformers and datasets, and Lhotse. By replacing ESPnet design choices inherited from Kaldi with a Python-only, Bash-free interface, we dramatically reduce the effort required to build, debug, and use a new model. For example, to fine-tune a speech foundation model, ESPnet-EZ, compared to ESPnet, reduces the number of newly written code by 2.7x and the amount of dependent code by 6.7x while dramatically reducing the Bash script dependencies. The codebase of ESPnet-EZ is publicly available.1 Masao Someki, Kwanghee Choi, Siddhant Arora, Samuele Cornell, Jionghao Han, Yifan Peng 0003, Jiatong Shi, Vaibhav Srivastav, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
SLT | 3 |
| 2023 | SLUE Phase-2: A Benchmark Suite of Diverse Spoken Language Understanding TasksabstractSuwon Shon, Siddhant Arora, Chyi-Jiunn Lin, Ankita Pasad, Felix Wu, Roshan S Sharma, Wei-Lun Wu, Hung-yi Lee, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023. Suwon Shon, Siddhant Arora, Chyi-Jiunn Lin, Ankita Pasad, Felix Wu, Roshan S. Sharma, Wei-Lun Wu, Hung-yi Lee, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ACL (1) | 2 |
| 2023 | Reproducing Whisper-Style Training Using An Open-Source Toolkit And Publicly Available DataabstractPre-training speech models on large volumes of data has achieved remarkable success. OpenAI Whisper is a multilingual multitask model trained on 680k hours of supervised speech data. It generalizes well to various speech recognition and translation benchmarks even in a zero-shot setup. However, the full pipeline for developing such models (from data collection to training) is not publicly accessible, which makes it difficult for researchers to further improve its performance and address training-related issues such as efficiency, robustness, fairness, and bias. This work presents an Open Whisper-style Speech Model (OWSM), which reproduces Whisperstyle training using an open-source toolkit and publicly available data. OWSM even supports more translation directions and can be more efficient to train. We will publicly release all scripts used for data preparation, training, inference, and scoring as well as pretrained models and training logs to promote open science.11https://github.com/espnet/espnet Yifan Peng 0003, Jinchuan Tian, Brian Yan, Dan Berrebbi, Xuankai Chang, Jiatong Shi, Siddhant Arora, Roshan S. Sharma, Wangyou Zhang, Yui Sudo, Muhammad Shakeel 0001, Jee-Weon Jung, Soumi Maiti, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ASRU | 8 |
| 2023 | Espnet-Summ: Introducing a Novel Large Dataset, Toolkit, and a Cross-Corpora Evaluation of Speech Summarization SystemsabstractSpeech summarization has garnered significant interest and progressed rapidly over the past few years. In particular, end-to-end models have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to cascade systems for abstractive video summarization. This paper aims to establish progress in this rapidly evolving research field, by introducing ESPNet-SUMM, a new open-source toolkit that facilitates a comprehensive comparison of end-to-end and cascade speech summarization models on 4 different speech summarization tasks spanning diverse applications. Experiments demonstrate that end-to-end models perform better for larger corpora with shorter inputs. This work also introduces Interview, the largest public open-domain multiparty interview corpus with $4400 \mathrm{~h}$ of conversations between radio hosts and guests. Finally, this work explores the use of multiple datasets to improve end-to-end summarization, and experiments demonstrate the benefit of multi-style training over fine-tuning. 1 Roshan S. Sharma, Takatomo Kano, Ruchira Sharma, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001, Atsunori Ogawa, Marc Delcroix, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj |
ASRU | 5 |
| 2023 | Joint Modelling of Spoken Language Understanding Tasks with Integrated Dialog HistoryabstractMost human interactions occur in the form of spoken conversations where the semantic meaning of a given utterance depends on the context. Each utterance in spoken conversation can be represented by many semantic and speaker attributes, and there has been an interest in building Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems for automatically predicting these attributes. Recent work has shown that incorporating dialogue history can help advance SLU performance. However, separate models are used for each SLU task, leading to an increase in inference time and computation cost. Motivated by this, we aim to ask: can we jointly model all the SLU tasks while incorporating context to facilitate low-latency and lightweight inference? To answer this, we propose a novel model architecture that learns dialog context to jointly predict the intent, dialog act, speaker role, and emotion for the spoken utterance. Note that our joint prediction is based on an autoregressive model and we need to decide the prediction order of dialog attributes, which is not trivial. To mitigate the issue, we also propose an order agnostic training method. Our experiments show that our joint model achieves similar results to task-specific classifiers and can effectively integrate dialog context to further improve the SLU performance.1 Siddhant Arora, Hayato Futami, Emiru Tsunoo, Brian Yan, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ICASSP | 1 |
| 2023 | A Study on the Integration of Pipeline and E2E SLU Systems for Spoken Semantic Parsing Toward Stop Quality ChallengeabstractRecently there have been efforts to introduce new benchmark tasks for spoken language understanding (SLU), like semantic parsing. In this paper, we describe our proposed spoken semantic parsing system for the quality track (Track 1) in Spoken Language Understanding Grand Challenge which is part of ICASSP Signal Processing Grand Challenge 2023. We experiment with both end-to-end and pipeline systems for this task. Strong automatic speech recognition (ASR) models like Whisper and pretrained Language models (LM) like BART are utilized inside our SLU framework to boost performance. We also investigate the output level combination of various models to get an exact match accuracy of 80.8, which won the 1st place at the challenge. Siddhant Arora, Hayato Futami, Shih-Lun Wu, Jessica Huynh, Yifan Peng 0003, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Emiru Tsunoo, Brian Yan, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ICASSP | 1 |
| 2023 | The Pipeline System of ASR and NLU with MLM-based data Augmentation Toward Stop Low-Resource ChallengeabstractThis paper describes our system for the low-resource domain adaptation track (Track 3) in Spoken Language Understanding Grand Challenge, which is a part of ICASSP Signal Processing Grand Challenge 2023. In the track, we adopt a pipeline approach of ASR and NLU. For ASR, we fine-tune Whisper for each domain with upsampling. For NLU, we fine-tune BART on all the Track3 data and then on low-resource domain data. We apply masked LM (MLM) -based data augmentation, where some of input tokens and corresponding target labels are replaced using MLM. We also apply a retrieval-based approach, where model input is augmented with similar training samples. As a result, we achieved exact match (EM) accuracy 63.3/75.0 (average: 69.15) for reminder/weather domain, and won the 1st place at the challenge. Hayato Futami, Jessica Huynh, Siddhant Arora, Shih-Lun Wu, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Yifan Peng 0003, Brian Yan, Emiru Tsunoo, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ICASSP | 3 |
| 2023 | Streaming Joint Speech Recognition and Disfluency DetectionabstractDisfluency detection has mainly been solved in a pipeline approach, as post-processing of speech recognition. In this study, we propose Transformer-based encoder-decoder models that jointly solve speech recognition and disfluency detection, which work in a streaming manner. Compared to pipeline approaches, the joint models can leverage acoustic information that makes disfluency detection robust to recognition errors and provide non-verbal clues. Moreover, joint modeling results in low-latency and lightweight inference. We investigate two joint model variants for streaming disfluency detection: a transcript-enriched model and a multi-task model. The transcript- enriched model is trained on text with special tags indicating the starting and ending points of the disfluent part. However, it has problems with latency and standard language model adaptation, which arise from the additional disfluency tags. We propose a multi-task model to solve such problems, which has two output layers at the Transformer decoder; one for speech recognition and the other for disfluency detection. It is modeled to be conditioned on the currently recognized token with an additional token-dependency mechanism. We show that the proposed joint models outperformed a BERT-based pipeline approach in both accuracy and latency, on both the Switch- board and the corpus of spontaneous Japanese. Hayato Futami, Emiru Tsunoo, Kentaro Shibata, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Takao Okuda, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ICASSP | 6 |
| 2023 | E-Branchformer-Based E2E SLU Toward Stop on-Device ChallengeabstractIn this paper, we report our team’s study on track 2 of the Spoken Language Understanding Grand Challenge, which is a component of the ICASSP Signal Processing Grand Challenge 2023. The task is intended for on-device processing and involves estimating semantic parse labels from speech using a model with 15 million parameters. We use E2E E-Branchformer-based spoken language understanding model, which is more parameter controllable than cascade models, and reduced the parameter size through sequential distillation and tensor decomposition techniques. On the STOP dataset, we achieved an exact match accuracy of 70.9% under the tight constraint of 15 million parameters. Yosuke Kashiwagi, Siddhant Arora, Hayato Futami, Jessica Huynh, Shih-Lun Wu, Yifan Peng 0003, Brian Yan, Emiru Tsunoo, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ICASSP | 2 |
| 2023 | BASS: Block-wise Adaptation for Speech Summarization
Roshan S. Sharma, Siddhant Arora, Kenneth Zheng, Shinji Watanabe 0001, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj |
INTERSPEECH | 2 |
| 2023 | Integrating Pretrained ASR and LM to Perform Sequence Generation for Spoken Language Understanding
Siddhant Arora, Hayato Futami, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Emiru Tsunoo, Brian Yan, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 1 |
| 2023 | Tensor decomposition for minimization of E2E SLU model toward on-device processing
Yosuke Kashiwagi, Siddhant Arora, Hayato Futami, Jessica Huynh, Shih-Lun Wu, Yifan Peng 0003, Brian Yan, Emiru Tsunoo, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 2 |
| 2023 | A Comparative Study on E-Branchformer vs Conformer in Speech Recognition, Translation, and Understanding Tasks
Yifan Peng 0003, Kwangyoun Kim, Felix Wu, Brian Yan, Siddhant Arora, Jiyang Tang, Suwon Shon, Prashant Sridhar, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 5 |
| 2023 | Integration of Frame- and Label-synchronous Beam Search for Streaming Encoder-decoder Speech Recognition
Emiru Tsunoo, Hayato Futami, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 4 |
| 2022 | Explain, Edit, and Understand: Rethinking User Study Design for Evaluating Model ExplanationsabstractIn attempts to "explain" predictions of machine learning models, researchers have proposed hundreds of techniques for attributing predictions to features that are deemed important. While these attributions are often claimed to hold the potential to improve human "understanding" of the models, surprisingly little work explicitly evaluates progress towards this aspiration. In this paper, we conduct a crowdsourcing study, where participants interact with deception detection models that have been trained to distinguish between genuine and fake hotel reviews. They are challenged both to simulate the model on fresh reviews, and to edit reviews with the goal of lowering the probability of the originally predicted class. Successful manipulations would lead to an adversarial example. During the training (but not the test) phase, input spans are highlighted to communicate salience. Through our evaluation, we observe that for a linear bag-of-words model, participants with access to the feature coefficients during training are able to cause a larger reduction in model confidence in the testing phase when compared to the no-explanation control. For the BERT-based classifier, popular local explanations do not improve their ability to reduce the model confidence over the no-explanation case. Remarkably, when the explanation for the BERT model is given by the (global) attributions of a linear model trained to imitate the BERT model, people can effectively manipulate the model. Siddhant Arora, Danish Pruthi, Norman M. Sadeh, William W. Cohen, Zachary C. Lipton, Graham Neubig |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2022 | ESPnet-SLU: Advancing Spoken Language Understanding Through ESPnetabstractAs Automatic Speech Processing (ASR) systems are getting better, there is an increasing interest of using the ASR output to do downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, there are few open source toolkits that can be used to generate reproducible results on different Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) benchmarks. Hence, there is a need to build an open source standard that can be used to have a faster start into SLU research. We present ESPnet-SLU, which is designed for quick development of spoken language understanding in a single framework. ESPnet-SLU is a project inside end-to-end speech processing toolkit, ESPnet, which is a widely used open-source standard for various speech processing tasks like ASR, Text to Speech (TTS) and Speech Translation (ST). We enhance the toolkit to provide implementations for various SLU benchmarks that enable researchers to seamlessly mix-and-match different ASR and NLU models. We also provide pretrained models with intensively tuned hyper-parameters that can match or even outperform the current state-of-the-art performances. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/espnet/espnet. Siddhant Arora, Siddharth Dalmia, Pavel Denisov, Xuankai Chang, Yushi Ueda, Yifan Peng 0003, Yuekai Zhang, Sujay Kumar, Karthik Ganesan 0003, Brian Yan, Ngoc Thang Vu, Alan W. Black, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
ICASSP | 1 |
| 2022 | Two-Pass Low Latency End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding
Siddhant Arora, Siddharth Dalmia, Xuankai Chang, Brian Yan, Alan W. Black, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
INTERSPEECH | 1 |
| 2022 | Blockwise Streaming Transformer for Spoken Language Understanding and Simultaneous Speech TranslationabstractAlthough Transformers have gained success in several speech processing tasks like spoken language understanding (SLU) and speech translation (ST), achieving online processing while keeping competitive performance is still essential for real-world interaction.In this paper, we take the first step on streaming SLU and simultaneous ST using a blockwise streaming Transformer, which is based on contextual block processing and blockwise synchronous beam search.Furthermore, we design an automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based intermediate loss regularization for the streaming SLU task to improve the classification performance further.As for the simultaneous ST task, we propose a cross-lingual encoding method, which employs a CTC branch optimized with target language translations.In addition, the CTC translation output is also used to refine the search space with CTC prefix score, achieving joint CTC/attention simultaneous translation for the first time.Experiments for SLU are conducted on FSC and SLURP corpora, while the ST task is evaluated on Fisher-CallHome Spanish and MuST-C En-De corpora.Experimental results show that the blockwise streaming Transformer achieves competitive results compared to offline models, especially with our proposed methods that further yield a 2.4% accuracy gain on the SLU task and a 4.3 BLEU gain on the ST task over streaming baselines. Keqi Deng, Shinji Watanabe 0001, Jiatong Shi, Siddhant Arora |
INTERSPEECH | 4 |
| 2022 | A Tale of Two Regulatory Regimes: Creation and Analysis of a Bilingual Privacy Policy CorpusabstractOver the past decade, researchers have started to explore the use of NLP to develop tools aimed at helping the public, vendors, and regulators analyze disclosures made in privacy policies. With the introduction of new privacy regulations, the language of privacy policies is also evolving, and disclosures made by the same organization are not always the same in different languages, especially when used to communicate with users who fall under different jurisdictions. This work explores the use of language technologies to capture and analyze these differences at scale. We introduce an annotation scheme designed to capture the nuances of two new landmark privacy regulations, namely the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA/CPRA. We then introduce the first bilingual corpus of mobile app privacy policies consisting of 64 privacy policies in English (292K words) and 91 privacy policies in German (478K words), respectively with manual annotations for 8K and 19K fine-grained data practices. The annotations are used to develop computational methods that can automatically extract “disclosures” from privacy policies. Analysis of a subset of 59 “semi-parallel” policies reveals differences that can be attributed to different regulatory regimes, suggesting that systematic analysis of policies using automated language technologies is indeed a worthwhile endeavor. Siddhant Arora, Henry Hosseini, Christine Utz, Vinayshekhar Bannihatti Kumar, Tristan Dhellemmes, Abhilasha Ravichander, Peter Story, Jasmine Mangat, Rex Chen, Martin Degeling, Thomas B. Norton, Thomas Hupperich, Shomir Wilson, Norman M. Sadeh |
LREC | 1 |
| 2022 | A Study on the Integration of Pre-Trained SSL, ASR, LM and SLU Models for Spoken Language UnderstandingabstractCollecting sufficient labeled data for spoken language understanding (SLU) is expensive and time-consuming. Recent studies achieved promising results by using pre-trained models in low-resource scenarios. Inspired by this, we aim to ask: which (if any) pre-training strategies can improve performance across SLU benchmarks? To answer this question, we employ four types of pre-trained models and their combinations for SLU. We leverage self-supervised speech and language models (LM) pre-trained on large quantities of un-paired data to extract strong speech and text representations. We also explore using supervised models pre-trained on larger external automatic speech recognition (ASR) or SLU corpora. We conduct extensive experiments on the SLU Evaluation (SLUE) benchmark and observe self-supervised pre-trained models to be more powerful, with pre-trained LM and speech models being most beneficial for the Sentiment Analysis and Named Entity Recognition task, respectively.11Our code and models will be publicly available as part of the ESPnet-SLU toolkit. Yifan Peng 0003, Siddhant Arora, Yosuke Higuchi, Yushi Ueda, Sujay Kumar, Karthik Ganesan 0003, Siddharth Dalmia, Xuankai Chang, Shinji Watanabe 0001 |
SLT | 2 |
| 2021 | Rethinking End-to-End Evaluation of Decomposable Tasks: A Case Study on Spoken Language UnderstandingabstractDecomposable tasks are complex and comprise of a hierarchy of sub-tasks. Spoken intent prediction, for example, combines automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding. Existing benchmarks, however, typically hold out examples for only the surface-level sub-task. As a result, models with similar performance on these benchmarks may have unobserved performance differences on the other sub-tasks. To allow insightful comparisons between competitive end-to-end architectures, we propose a framework to construct robust test sets using coordinate ascent over sub-task specific utility functions. Given a dataset for a decomposable task, our method optimally creates a test set for each sub-task to individually assess sub-components of the end-to-end model. Using spoken language understanding as a case study, we generate new splits for the Fluent Speech Commands and Snips SmartLights datasets. Each split has two test sets: one with held-out utterances assessing natural language understanding abilities, and one with held-out speakers to test speech processing skills. Our splits identify performance gaps up to 10% between end-to-end systems that were within 1% of each other on the original test sets. These performance gaps allow more realistic and actionable comparisons between different architectures, driving future model development. We release our splits and tools for the community. Siddhant Arora, Alissa Ostapenko, Vijay Viswanathan 0002, Siddharth Dalmia, Florian Metze, Shinji Watanabe 0001, Alan W. Black |
Interspeech | 1 |
| 2020 | Capreolus: A Toolkit for End-to-End Neural Ad Hoc RetrievalabstractWe present Capreolus, a toolkit designed to facilitate end-to-end it ad hoc retrieval experiments with neural networks by providing implementations of prominent neural ranking models within a common framework. Our toolkit adopts a standard reranking architecture via tight integration with the Anserini toolkit for candidate document generation using standard bag-of-words approaches. Using Capreolus, we are able to reproduce Yang et al.'s recent SIGIR 2019 finding that, in a reranking scenario on the test collection from the TREC 2004 Robust Track, many neural retrieval models do not significantly outperform a strong query expansion baseline. Furthermore, we find that this holds true for five additional models implemented in Capreolus. We describe the architecture and design of our toolkit, which includes a Web interface to facilitate comparisons between rankings returned by different models. Andrew Yates, Siddhant Arora, Xinyu Zhang 0018, Wei Yang 0017, Kevin Martin Jose, Jimmy Lin |
WSDM | 2 |