Whisper: Courtside Edition Enhancing ASR Performance Through LLM-Driven Context Generation

Domain-specific speech remains a persistent challenge for automatic speech recognition (ASR), even for state-of-the-art systems like OpenAI's Whisper. We introduce Whisper: Courtside Edition, a novel multi-agent large language model (LLM) pipeline that enhances Whisper transcriptions without retraining. The pipeline intercepts Whisper's initial transcript, applies specialized LLM agents for domain context identification, named entity recognition, and jargon detection, and generates compact prompts that guide Whisper's decoder. Evaluated on 421 NBA basketball commentary segments (a domain characterized by dense proper nouns and technical terminology) our best pipeline achieves a statistically significant 17.0% relative reduction in word error rate (WER; from 0.217 to 0.180, p<0.001). Improvements are observed in 40.1% of segments with degradation in only 7.1%, substantially outperforming direct transcript post-editing. These results demonstrate that prompt-based augmentation can deliver scalable domain adaptation for ASR, offering a practical alternative to costly model fine-tuning.

Continuous Telemonitoring of Heart Failure using Personalised Speech Dynamics

Remote monitoring of heart failure (HF) via speech signals provides a non-invasive and cost-effective solution for long-term patient management. However, substantial inter-individual heterogeneity in vocal characteristics often limits the accuracy of traditional cross-sectional classification models. To address this, we propose a Longitudinal Intra-Patient Tracking (LIPT) scheme designed to capture the trajectory of relative symptomatic changes within individuals. Central to this framework is a Personalised Sequential Encoder (PSE), which transforms longitudinal speech recordings into context-aware latent representations. By incorporating historical data at each timestamp, the PSE facilitates a holistic assessment of the clinical trajectory rather than modelling discrete visits independently. Experimental results from a cohort of 225 patients demonstrate that the LIPT paradigm significantly outperforms the classic cross-sectional approaches, achieving a recognition accuracy of 99.7% for clinical status transitions. The model's high sensitivity was further corroborated by additional follow-up data, confirming its efficacy in predicting HF deterioration and its potential to secure patient safety in remote, home-based settings. Furthermore, this work addresses the gap in existing literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of different speech task designs and acoustic features. Taken together, the superior performance of the LIPT framework and PSE architecture validates their readiness for integration into long-term telemonitoring systems, offering a scalable solution for remote heart failure management.

Color-based Emotion Representation for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition (SER) has traditionally relied on categorical or dimensional labels. However, this technique is limited in representing both the diversity and interpretability of emotions. To overcome this limitation, we focus on color attributes, such as hue, saturation, and value, to represent emotions as continuous and interpretable scores. We annotated an emotional speech corpus with color attributes via crowdsourcing and analyzed them. Moreover, we built regression models for color attributes in SER using machine learning and deep learning, and explored the multitask learning of color attribute regression and emotion classification. As a result, we demonstrated the relationship between color attributes and emotions in speech, and successfully developed color attribute regression models for SER. We also showed that multitask learning improved the performance of each task.

TurkicNLP: An NLP Toolkit for Turkic Languages

Natural language processing for the Turkic language family, spoken by over 200 million people across Eurasia, remains fragmented, with most languages lacking unified tooling and resources. We present TurkicNLP, an open-source Python library providing a single, consistent NLP pipeline for Turkic languages across four script families: Latin, Cyrillic, Perso-Arabic, and Old Turkic Runic. The library covers tokenization, morphological analysis, part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing, named entity recognition, bidirectional script transliteration, cross-lingual sentence embeddings, and machine translation through one language-agnostic API. A modular multi-backend architecture integrates rule-based finite-state transducers and neural models transparently, with automatic script detection and routing between script variants. Outputs follow the CoNLL-U standard for full interoperability and extension. Code and documentation are hosted at https://github.com/turkic-nlp/turkicnlp .

Assessing the Impact of Speaker Identity in Speech Spoofing Detection

Spoofing detection systems are typically trained using diverse recordings from multiple speakers, often assuming that the resulting embeddings are independent of speaker identity. However, this assumption remains unverified. In this paper, we investigate the impact of speaker information on spoofing detection systems. We propose two approaches within our Speaker-Invariant Multi-Task framework, one that models speaker identity within the embeddings and another that removes it. SInMT integrates multi-task learning for joint speaker recognition and spoofing detection, incorporating a gradient reversal layer. Evaluated using four datasets, our speaker-invariant model reduces the average equal error rate by 17% compared to the baseline, with up to 48% reduction for the most challenging attacks (e.g., A11).

Voice-Driven Semantic Perception for UAV-Assisted Emergency Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted networks are increasingly foreseen as a promising approach for emergency response, providing rapid, flexible, and resilient communications in environments where terrestrial infrastructure is degraded or unavailable. In such scenarios, voice radio communications remain essential for first responders due to their robustness; however, their unstructured nature prevents direct integration with automated UAV-assisted network management. This paper proposes SIREN, an AI-driven framework that enables voice-driven perception for UAV-assisted networks. By integrating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with Large Language Model (LLM)-based semantic extraction and Natural Language Processing (NLP) validation, SIREN converts emergency voice traffic into structured, machine-readable information, including responding units, location references, emergency severity, and Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. SIREN is evaluated using synthetic emergency scenarios with controlled variations in language, speaker count, background noise, and message complexity. The results demonstrate robust transcription and reliable semantic extraction across diverse operating conditions, while highlighting speaker diarization and geographic ambiguity as the main limiting factors. These findings establish the feasibility of voice-driven situational awareness for UAV-assisted networks and show a practical foundation for human-in-the-loop decision support and adaptive network management in emergency response operations.

Joint Enhancement and Classification using Coupled Diffusion Models of Signals and Logits

Robust classification in noisy environments remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning. Standard approaches typically treat signal enhancement and classification as separate, sequential stages: first enhancing the signal and then applying a classifier. This approach fails to leverage the semantic information in the classifier's output during denoising. In this work, we propose a general, domain-agnostic framework that integrates two interacting diffusion models: one operating on the input signal and the other on the classifier's output logits, without requiring any retraining or fine-tuning of the classifier. This coupled formulation enables mutual guidance, where the enhancing signal refines the class estimation and, conversely, the evolving class logits guide the signal reconstruction towards discriminative regions of the manifold. We introduce three strategies to effectively model the joint distribution of the input and the logit. We evaluated our joint enhancement method for image classification and automatic speech recognition. The proposed framework surpasses traditional sequential enhancement baselines, delivering robust and flexible improvements in classification accuracy under diverse noise conditions.

Enroll-on-Wakeup: A First Comparative Study of Target Speech Extraction for Seamless Interaction in Real Noisy Human-Machine Dialogue Scenarios

Target speech extraction (TSE) typically relies on pre-recorded high-quality enrollment speech, which disrupts user experience and limits feasibility in spontaneous interaction. In this paper, we propose Enroll-on-Wakeup (EoW), a novel framework where the wake-word segment, captured naturally during human-machine interaction, is automatically utilized as the enrollment reference. This eliminates the need for pre-collected speech to enable a seamless experience. We perform the first systematic study of EoW-TSE, evaluating advanced discriminative and generative models under real diverse acoustic conditions. Given the short and noisy nature of wake-word segments, we investigate enrollment augmentation using LLM-based TTS. Results show that while current TSE models face performance degradation in EoW-TSE, TTS-based assistance significantly enhances the listening experience, though gaps remain in speech recognition accuracy.

"Sorry, I Didn't Catch That": How Speech Models Miss What Matters Most

Despite speech recognition systems achieving low word error rates on standard benchmarks, they often fail on short, high-stakes utterances in real-world deployments. Here, we study this failure mode in a high-stakes task: the transcription of U.S. street names as spoken by U.S. participants. We evaluate 15 models from OpenAI, Deepgram, Google, and Microsoft on recordings from linguistically diverse U.S. speakers and find an average transcription error rate of 44%. We quantify the downstream impact of failed transcriptions by geographic locations and show that mis-transcriptions systematically cause errors for all speakers, but that routing distance errors are twice as large for non-English primary speakers compared to English primary speakers. To mitigate this harm, we introduce a synthetic data generation approach that produces diverse pronunciations of named entities using open-source text-to-speech models. Fine-tuning with less than 1,000 synthetic samples improves street name transcription accuracy by nearly 60% (relative to base models) for non-English primary speakers. Our results highlight a critical gap between benchmark performance and real-world reliability in speech systems and demonstrate a simple, scalable path to reducing high-stakes transcription errors.

CLAP-Based Automatic Word Naming Recognition in Post-Stroke Aphasia

Conventional automatic word-naming recognition systems struggle to recognize words from post-stroke patients with aphasia because of disfluencies and mispronunciations, limiting reliable automated assessment in this population. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) based approach for automatic word-naming recognition to address this challenge by leveraging text-audio alignment. Our approach treats word-naming recognition as an audio-text matching problem, projecting speech signals and textual prompts into a shared embedding space to identify intended words even in challenging recordings. Evaluated on two speech datasets of French post-stroke patients with aphasia, our approach achieves up to 90% accuracy, outperforming existing classification-based and automatic speech recognition-based baselines.