United States

Byte-based machine translation systems have shown significant potential in massively multilingual settings. Unicode encoding, which maps each character to specific byte(s), eliminates the emergence of unknown words, even in new languages, enabling broad language scalability. However, byte-level tokenization results in sequences that are hard to interpret due to limited semantic information per byte. Local contextualization has proven effective in assigning initial semantics to tokens, improving sentence comprehension. Nevertheless, variations in encoding rules across languages necessitate an adaptive approach for effective contextualization. To this end, we propose Adaptive MultiScale-Headed Attention (Ada-MSHA), adaptively selecting and mixing attention heads, which are treated as contextualization experts. This enhances the flexibility of contextualization scales and improves the potential to discover a better strategy than previous methods. Experiment results show that our method outperforms existing methods without extensive manual adjustment of hyper-parameters and surpasses subword-based models with fewer parameters in Ted-59 dataset.

NAACL 2025

MoCE: Adaptive Mixture of Contextualization Experts for Byte-based Neural Machine Translation

byte-based model

machine translation

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

technical paper

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The task of automated code review has recently gained a lot of attention from the machine learning community. However, current review comment evaluation metrics rely on comparisons with a human-written reference for a given code change (also called a diff ). Furthermore, code review is a one-to-many problem, like generation and summarization, with many “valid reviews” for a diff. Thus, we develop CRScore — a reference-free metric to measure dimensions of review quality like conciseness, comprehensiveness, and relevance. We design CRScore to evaluate reviews in a way that is grounded in claims and potential issues detected in the code by LLMs and static analyzers. We demonstrate that CRScore can produce valid, fine-grained scores of review quality that have the greatest alignment with human judgment among open-source metrics (0.54 Spearman correlation) and are more sensitive than reference-based metrics. We also release a corpus of 2.9k human-annotated review quality scores for machine-generated and GitHub review comments to support the development of automated metrics.

CRScore: Grounding Automated Evaluation of Code Review Comments in Code Claims and Smells

There has been increasing interest in building multilingual foundation models for NLP and speech research. This paper examines how to expand the speech translation capability of these models with restricted data. Whisper, a speech foundation model with strong performance on speech recognition and English translation, is used as the example model. Using speech-to-speech retrieval to analyse the audio representations generated by the encoder, we show that utterances from different languages are mapped to a shared semantic space. This shared embedding space can then be leveraged for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in speech translation. By fine-tuning the Whisper decoder with only English-to-Chinese speech translation data, improved performance for translation to Chinese can be obtained for multiple languages, in addition to English. Furthermore, for languages related to those seen in training it is possible to perform speech translation, despite the model never seeing the language in training, or being able to perform transcription.

Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Speech Translation

Following the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in NLP tasks, there is increasing interest in extending their capabilities to speech---the most common form of communication. The most widespread approach to integrating speech into LLMs is dense feature prepending (DFP), which prepends the projected speech representations to the textual representations, allowing end-to-end training with a speech encoder. This raises questions about the need for a sophisticated speech encoder for DFP and how its performance compares with a standard encoder-decoder (i.e., cross-attention) architecture. We compare DFP and cross-attention under a variety of configurations, such as CTC compression, sequence-level knowledge distillation, on monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual models. To perform a controlled architectural comparison, we train all models from scratch rather than using large pretrained models and use comparable data and parameter settings, testing speech-to-text recognition (ASR) and translation (ST) on MuST-C v1.0 and CoVoST2 datasets. Despite the wide adoption of DFP, our results do not indicate a clear advantage of DFP over cross-attention.

Prepending or Cross-Attention for Speech-to-Text? An Empirical Comparison

We introduce AudioBench, a universal benchmark designed to evaluate Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs). It encompasses 8 distinct tasks and 26 datasets, among which, 7 are newly proposed datasets. The evaluation targets three main aspects: speech understanding, audio scene understanding, and voice understanding (paralinguistic). Despite recent advancements, there lacks a comprehensive benchmark for AudioLLMs on instruction following capabilities conditioned on audio signals. AudioBench addresses this gap by setting up datasets as well as desired evaluation metrics. Besides, we also evaluated the capabilities of five popular models and found that no single model excels consistently across all tasks. We outline the research outlook for AudioLLMs and anticipate that our open-sourced evaluation toolkit, data, and leaderboard will offer a robust testbed for future model developments.

AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Models

Dysarthric speech recognition often suffers from performance degradation due to the intrinsic diversity of dysarthric severity and extrinsic disparity from normal speech. To bridge these gaps, we propose a Dynamic Phoneme-level Contrastive Learning (DyPCL) method, which leads to obtaining invariant representations across diverse speakers. We decompose the speech utterance into phoneme segments for phoneme-level contrastive learning, leveraging dynamic connectionist temporal classification alignment. Unlike prior studies focusing on utterance-level embeddings, our granular learning allows discrimination of subtle parts of speech. In addition, we introduce dynamic curriculum learning, which progressively transitions from easy negative samples to difficult-to-distinguishable negative samples based on phonetic similarity of phoneme. Our approach to training by difficulty levels alleviates the inherent variability of speakers, better identifying challenging speeches. Evaluated on the UASpeech dataset, DyPCL outperforms baseline models, achieving an average 22.10% relative reduction in word error rate (WER) across the overall dysarthria group.

DyPCL: Dynamic Phoneme-level Contrastive Learning for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

Spontaneous or conversational multilingual speech presents many challenges for state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this work, we present a new technique AMPS, that augments a multilingual multimodal ASR system with paraphrase-based supervision for improved conversational ASR in multiple languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, and Nyanja. We use paraphrases of the reference transcriptions as additional supervision while training the multimodal ASR model and selectively invoke this paraphrase objective for utterances with poor ASR performance. Using AMPS with a state-of-the-art multimodal model SeamlessM4T, we obtain significant relative reductions in word error rates (WERs) of up to 5%. We present detailed analyses of our system using both objective and human evaluation metrics.

AMPS: ASR with Multimodal Paraphrase Supervision

Recent studies have augmented large language models (LLMs) with speech capabilities, leading to the development of speech language models (SpeechLMs). Earlier SpeechLMs focused on single-turn speech-based question answering (QA), where user input comprised a speech context and a text question. More recent studies have extended this to multi-turn conversations, though they often require complex, multi-stage supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with diverse data. Another critical challenge with SpeechLMs is catastrophic forgetting, where models optimized for speech tasks suffer significant degradation in text-only performance. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel single-stage joint speech-text SFT approach on the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) of the LLM backbone. Our joint SFT combines text-only SFT data with three types of speech-related data: speech recognition and translation, speech-based QA, and mixed-modal SFT. Compared to previous SpeechLMs with 7B or 13B parameters, our 3B model demonstrates superior performance across various speech benchmarks while preserving the original capabilities on text-only tasks. Furthermore, our model shows emergent abilities of effectively handling previously unseen prompts and tasks, including multi-turn, mixed-modal inputs.

VoiceTextBlender: Augmenting Large Language Models with Speech Capabilities via Single-Stage Joint Speech-Text Supervised Fine-Tuning

While recent zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) models achieve impressive results, they typically rely on extensive transcribed speech datasets from numerous speakers and intricate training pipelines. Meanwhile, self-supervised learning (SSL) speech features have emerged as effective intermediate representations for TTS. Further, SSL features from different speakers that are linearly close share phonetic information while maintaining individual speaker identity. In this study, we introduce kNN-TTS, a simple and effective framework for zero-shot multi-speaker TTS using retrieval methods which leverage the linear relationships between SSL features. Objective and subjective evaluations show that our models, trained on transcribed speech from a single speaker only, achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art models that are trained on significantly larger training datasets. The low training data requirements mean that kNN-TTS is well suited for the development of multi-speaker TTS systems for low-resource domains and languages. We also introduce an interpolation parameter which enables fine-grained voice morphing. Demo samples are available at https://idiap.github.io/knn-tts .

kNN Retrieval for Simple and Effective Zero-Shot Multi-speaker Text-to-Speech

Emotional dialogue speech synthesis (EDSS) aims to generate expressive speech by leveraging the dialogue context between interlocutors. This is typically done by concatenating global representations of previous utterances as conditions for text-to-speech (TTS) systems. However, such approaches overlook the importance of integrating localized acoustic cues that convey emotion. To address this, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes a large language model (LLM) to generate holistic emotion tags based on prior dialogue context, while also pinpointing key words in the target utterance that align with the predicted emotional state. Furthermore, we enhance the emotional richness of synthesized speech by incorporating concentrated acoustic features of these key words through a novel selective audio masking loss function. This methodology not only improves emotional expressiveness, but also facilitates automatic emotion speech generation during inference by eliminating the need for manual emotion tag selection. Comprehensive subjective and objective evaluations and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Prompt-Guided Selective Masking Loss for Context-Aware Emotive Text-to-Speech

The fusion of speech and language in the era of large language models has garnered significant attention. Discrete speech token is often utilized in text-to-speech tasks for speech compression and portability, which is convenient for joint training with text and have good compression efficiency. However, we found that the discrete speech tokenizer still suffers from information loss. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective continuous speech tokenizer named Cont-SPT, and a text-to-speech model based on continuous speech tokens. Our results show that the speech language model based on the continuous speech tokenizer has better continuity and higher estimated Mean Opinion Scores (MoS). This enhancement is attributed to better information preservation rate of the continuous speech tokenizer across both low and high frequencies in the frequency domain. The code and resources for Cont-SPT can be found in https://github.com/Yixing-Li/Continuous-Speech-Tokenizer.

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