Seminar from Matthew Wiesner, associated researcher at LISN

Date : 05/01/2026
Time : 10h30
Place : IC2, Boardroom
Speaker : Matthew Wiesner
 
 

Modeling Accent and Language at Scale

Abstract: State-of-the-art LID models work reliably for ∼100 languages, but there are orders of magnitude more accents and dialects; annotating all of them is intractable. Furthermore, current LID models fail dramatically when applied to accented speech, and very few annotated accented data exist to support accented TTS.

This talk explores these challenges and proposes a potential partial solution using massive amounts of diverse and widely available data collected from radio, with soft language labels in the form of geolocations. The talk then explores the link between robustness to accented speech and the capacity to more effectively model sequence-level data. Finally, these models and insights are shown to greatly improve LID on accented speech, and can be used to mine for accented speech to support scalable, controllable accented TTS.