Pranesh Bhargava


Fixing paper assignments

  1. Please select all papers that belong to the same person.
  2. Indicate below which author they should be assigned to.
Provide a valid ORCID iD here. This will be used to match future papers to this author.
Provide the name of the school or the university where the author has received or will receive their highest degree (e.g., Ph.D. institution for researchers, or current affiliation for students). This will be used to form the new author page ID, if needed.

TODO: "submit" and "cancel" buttons here


2020

pdf bib
AccentDB: A Database of Non-Native English Accents to Assist Neural Speech Recognition
Afroz Ahamad | Ankit Anand | Pranesh Bhargava
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has evolved to identify the speech spoken by native speakers of a language very well. However, identification of the speech spoken by non-native speakers continues to be a major challenge for it. In this work, we first spell out the key requirements for creating a well-curated database of speech samples in non-native accents for training and testing robust ASR systems. We then introduce AccentDB, one such database that contains samples of 4 Indian-English accents collected by us, and a compilation of samples from 4 native-English, and a metropolitan Indian-English accent. We also present an analysis on separability of the collected accent data. Further, we present several accent classification models and evaluate them thoroughly against human-labelled accent classes. We test the generalization of our classifier models in a variety of setups of seen and unseen data. Finally, we introduce accent neutralization of non-native accents to native accents using autoencoder models with task-specific architectures. Thus, our work aims to aid ASR systems at every stage of development with a database for training, classification models for feature augmentation, and neutralization systems for acoustic transformations of non-native accents of English.