Multi-Teacher Language-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Multilingual Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is crucial for improving human-computer interaction. Despite strides in monolingual SER, extending them to build a multilingual system remains challenging. Our goal is to train a single model capable of multilingual SER by distilling knowledge from multiple teacher models. To address this, we introduce a novel language-aware multi-teacher knowledge distillation method to advance SER in English, Finnish, and French. It leverages Wav2Vec2.0 as the foundation of monolingual teacher models and then distills their knowledge into a single multilingual student model. The student model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, with a weighted recall of 72.9 on the English dataset and an unweighted recall of 63.4 on the Finnish dataset, surpassing fine-tuning and knowledge distillation baselines. Our method excels in improving recall for sad and neutral emotions, although it still faces challenges in recognizing anger and happiness.

DPCSpell: A Transformer-based Detector-Purificator-Corrector Framework for Spelling Error Correction of Bangla and Resource Scarce Indic Languages

Spelling error correction is the task of identifying and rectifying misspelled words in texts. It is a potential and active research topic in Natural Language Processing because of numerous applications in human language understanding. The phonetically or visually similar yet semantically distinct characters make it an arduous task in any language. Earlier efforts on spelling error correction in Bangla and resource-scarce Indic languages focused on rule-based, statistical, and machine learning-based methods which we found rather inefficient. In particular, machine learning-based approaches, which exhibit superior performance to rule-based and statistical methods, are ineffective as they correct each character regardless of its appropriateness. In this work, we propose a novel detector-purificator-corrector framework based on denoising transformers by addressing previous issues. Moreover, we present a method for large-scale corpus creation from scratch which in turn resolves the resource limitation problem of any left-to-right scripted language. The empirical outcomes demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach that outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin for Bangla spelling error correction. The models and corpus are publicly available at https://tinyurl.com/DPCSpell.