End-to-End Transformer-based Automatic Speech Recognition for Northern Kurdish: A Pioneering Approach

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages remains a challenging task due to limited training data. This paper introduces a comprehensive study exploring the effectiveness of Whisper, a pre-trained ASR model, for Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) an under-resourced language spoken in the Middle East. We investigate three fine-tuning strategies: vanilla, specific parameters, and additional modules. Using a Northern Kurdish fine-tuning speech corpus containing approximately 68 hours of validated transcribed data, our experiments demonstrate that the additional module fine-tuning strategy significantly improves ASR accuracy on a specialized test set, achieving a Word Error Rate (WER) of 10.5% and Character Error Rate (CER) of 5.7% with Whisper version 3. These results underscore the potential of sophisticated transformer models for low-resource ASR and emphasize the importance of tailored fine-tuning techniques for optimal performance.

Advanced Clustering Techniques for Speech Signal Enhancement: A Review and Metanalysis of Fuzzy C-Means, K-Means, and Kernel Fuzzy C-Means Methods

Speech signal processing is a cornerstone of modern communication technologies, tasked with improving the clarity and comprehensibility of audio data in noisy environments. The primary challenge in this field is the effective separation and recognition of speech from background noise, crucial for applications ranging from voice-activated assistants to automated transcription services. The quality of speech recognition directly impacts user experience and accessibility in technology-driven communication. This review paper explores advanced clustering techniques, particularly focusing on the Kernel Fuzzy C-Means (KFCM) method, to address these challenges. Our findings indicate that KFCM, compared to traditional methods like K-Means (KM) and Fuzzy C-Means (FCM), provides superior performance in handling non-linear and non-stationary noise conditions in speech signals. The most notable outcome of this review is the adaptability of KFCM to various noisy environments, making it a robust choice for speech enhancement applications. Additionally, the paper identifies gaps in current methodologies, such as the need for more dynamic clustering algorithms that can adapt in real time to changing noise conditions without compromising speech recognition quality. Key contributions include a detailed comparative analysis of current clustering algorithms and suggestions for further integrating hybrid models that combine KFCM with neural networks to enhance speech recognition accuracy. Through this review, we advocate for a shift towards more sophisticated, adaptive clustering techniques that can significantly improve speech enhancement and pave the way for more resilient speech processing systems.

Gammatonegram Representation for End-to-End Dysarthric Speech Processing Tasks: Speech Recognition, Speaker Identification, and Intelligibility Assessment

Dysarthria is a disability that causes a disturbance in the human speech system and reduces the quality and intelligibility of a person's speech. Because of this effect, the normal speech processing systems can not work properly on impaired speech. This disability is usually associated with physical disabilities. Therefore, designing a system that can perform some tasks by receiving voice commands in the smart home can be a significant achievement. In this work, we introduce gammatonegram as an effective method to represent audio files with discriminative details, which is used as input for the convolutional neural network. On the other word, we convert each speech file into an image and propose image recognition system to classify speech in different scenarios. Proposed CNN is based on the transfer learning method on the pre-trained Alexnet. In this research, the efficiency of the proposed system for speech recognition, speaker identification, and intelligibility assessment is evaluated. According to the results on the UA dataset, the proposed speech recognition system achieved 91.29% accuracy in speaker-dependent mode, the speaker identification system acquired 87.74% accuracy in text-dependent mode, and the intelligibility assessment system achieved 96.47% accuracy in two-class mode. Finally, we propose a multi-network speech recognition system that works fully automatically. This system is located in a cascade arrangement with the two-class intelligibility assessment system, and the output of this system activates each one of the speech recognition networks. This architecture achieves an accuracy of 92.3% WRR. The source code of this paper is available.

Adjustable Privacy using Autoencoder-based Learning Structure

Inference centers need more data to have a more comprehensive and beneficial learning model, and for this purpose, they need to collect data from data providers. On the other hand, data providers are cautious about delivering their datasets to inference centers in terms of privacy considerations. In this paper, by modifying the structure of the autoencoder, we present a method that manages the utility-privacy trade-off well. To be more precise, the data is first compressed using the encoder, then confidential and non-confidential features are separated and uncorrelated using the classifier. The confidential feature is appropriately combined with noise, and the non-confidential feature is enhanced, and at the end, data with the original data format is produced by the decoder. The proposed architecture also allows data providers to set the level of privacy required for confidential features. The proposed method has been examined for both image and categorical databases, and the results show a significant performance improvement compared to previous methods.

Fake news detection using parallel BERT deep neural networks

Fake news is a growing challenge for social networks and media. Detection of fake news always has been a problem for many years, but after the evolution of social networks and increasing speed of news dissemination in recent years has been considered again. There are several approaches to solving this problem, one of which is to detect fake news based on its text style using deep neural networks. In recent years, one of the most used forms of deep neural networks for natural language processing is transfer learning with transformers. BERT is one of the most promising transformers who outperforms other models in many NLP benchmarks. This article, we introduce MWPBert, which uses two parallel BERT networks to perform veracity detection on full-text news articles. One of the BERT networks encodes news headline, and another encodes news body. Since the input length of the BERT network is limited and constant and the news body is usually a long text, we cannot fed the whole news text into the BERT. Therefore, using the MaxWorth algorithm, we selected the part of the news text that is more valuable for fact-checking, and fed it into the BERT network. Finally, we encode the output of the two BERT networks to an output network to classify the news. The experiment results showed that the proposed model outperformed previous models in terms of accuracy and other performance measures.

CKMorph: A Comprehensive Morphological Analyzer for Central Kurdish

A morphological analyzer, which is a significant component of many natural language processing applications especially for morphologically rich languages, divides an input word into all its composing morphemes and identifies their morphological roles. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive morphological analyzer for Central Kurdish (CK), a low-resourced language with a rich morphology. Building upon the limited existing literature, we first assembled and systematically categorized a comprehensive collection of the morphological and morphophonological rules of the language. Additionally, we collected and manually labeled a generative lexicon containing nearly 10,000 verb, noun and adjective stems, named entities, and other types of word stems. We used these rule sets and resources to implement CKMorph Analyzer based on finite-state transducers. In order to provide a benchmark for future research, we collected, manually labeled, and publicly shared test sets for evaluating accuracy and coverage of the analyzer. CKMorph was able to correctly analyze 95.9% of the accuracy test set, containing 1,000 CK words morphologically analyzed according to the context. Moreover, CKMorph gave at least one analysis for 95.5% of 4.22M CK tokens of the coverage test set. The demonstration of the application and resources including CK verb database and test sets are openly accessible at https://github.com/CKMorph.

Persian Rhetorical Structure Theory

Over the past years, interest in discourse analysis and discourse parsing has steadily grown, and many discourse-annotated corpora and, as a result, discourse parsers have been built. In this paper, we present a discourse-annotated corpus for the Persian language built in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory as well as a discourse parser built upon the DPLP parser, an open-source discourse parser. Our corpus consists of 150 journalistic texts, each text having an average of around 400 words. Corpus texts were annotated using 18 discourse relations and based on the annotation guideline of the English RST Discourse Treebank corpus. Our text-level discourse parser is trained using gold segmentation and is built upon the DPLP discourse parser, which uses a large-margin transition-based approach to solve the problem of discourse parsing. The performance of our discourse parser in span (S), nuclearity (N) and relation (R) detection is around 78%, 64%, 44% respectively, in terms of F1 measure.

Automatic Meter Classification of Kurdish Poems

Most of the classic texts in Kurdish literature are poems. Knowing the meter of the poems is helpful for correct reading, a better understanding of the meaning, and avoidance of ambiguity. This paper presents a rule-based method for automatic classification of the poem meter for the Central Kurdish language. The metrical system of Kurdish poetry is divided into three classes of quantitative, syllabic, and free verses. As the vowel length is not phonemic in the language, there are uncertainties in syllable weight and meter identification. The proposed method generates all the possible situations and then, by considering all lines of the input poem and the common meter patterns of Kurdish poetry, identifies the most probable meter type and pattern of the input poem. Evaluation of the method on a dataset from VejinBooks Kurdish corpus resulted in 97.3% of precision in meter type and 96.2% of precision in pattern identification.

Jira: a Kurdish Speech Recognition System Designing and Building Speech Corpus and Pronunciation Lexicon

In this paper, we introduce the first large vocabulary speech recognition system (LVSR) for the Central Kurdish language, named Jira. The Kurdish language is an Indo-European language spoken by more than 30 million people in several countries, but due to the lack of speech and text resources, there is no speech recognition system for this language. To fill this gap, we introduce the first speech corpus and pronunciation lexicon for the Kurdish language. Regarding speech corpus, we designed a sentence collection in which the ratio of di-phones in the collection resembles the real data of the Central Kurdish language. The designed sentences are uttered by 576 speakers in a controlled environment with noise-free microphones (called AsoSoft Speech-Office) and in Telegram social network environment using mobile phones (denoted as AsoSoft Speech-Crowdsourcing), resulted in 43.68 hours of speech. Besides, a test set including 11 different document topics is designed and recorded in two corresponding speech conditions (i.e., Office and Crowdsourcing). Furthermore, a 60K pronunciation lexicon is prepared in this research in which we faced several challenges and proposed solutions for them. The Kurdish language has several dialects and sub-dialects that results in many lexical variations. Our methods for script standardization of lexical variations and automatic pronunciation of the lexicon tokens are presented in detail. To setup the recognition engine, we used the Kaldi toolkit. A statistical tri-gram language model that is extracted from the AsoSoft text corpus is used in the system. Several standard recipes including HMM-based models (i.e., mono, tri1, tr2, tri2, tri3), SGMM, and DNN methods are used to generate the acoustic model. These methods are trained with AsoSoft Speech-Office and AsoSoft Speech-Crowdsourcing and a combination of them. The best performance achieved by the SGMM acoustic model which results in 13.9% of the average word error rate (on different document topics) and 4.9% for the general topic.

Deep Neural Networks for Nonlinear Model Order Reduction of Unsteady Flows

Unsteady fluid systems are nonlinear high-dimensional dynamical systems that may exhibit multiple complex phenomena both in time and space. Reduced order modeling (ROM) of fluid flows has been an active research topic in the recent decade with the primary goal to decompose complex flows to a set of features most important for future state prediction and control, typically using a dimensionality reduction technique. In this work, a novel data-driven technique based on the power of deep neural networks for reduced order modeling of the unsteady fluid flows is introduced. An autoencoder network is used for nonlinear dimension reduction and feature extraction as an alternative for singular value decomposition (SVD). Then, the extracted features are used as an input for long short-term memory network (LSTM) to predict the velocity field at future time instances. The proposed autoencoder-LSTM method is compared with dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) as the data-driven base method. Moreover, an autoencoder-DMD algorithm is introduced for reduced order modeling, which uses the autoencoder network for dimensionality reduction rather than SVD rank truncation. Results show that the autoencoder-LSTM method is considerably capable of predicting the fluid flow evolution, where higher values for coefficient of determination $R^{2}$ are obtained using autoencoder-LSTM comparing to DMD.