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Code-switching, also called code-mixing, is the linguistics phenomenon where in casual settings, multilingual speakers mix words from different languages in one utterance. Due to its spontaneous nature, code-switching is extremely low-resource, which makes it a challenging problem for language and speech processing tasks. In such contexts, Code-Switching Language Identification (CSLID) becomes a difficult but necessary task if we want to maximally leverage existing monolingual tools for other tasks. In this work, we propose two novel approaches toward improving language identification accuracy on an English-Mandarin child-directed speech dataset. Our methods include a stacked Residual CNN+GRU model and a multitask pre-training approach to use Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) as an auxiliary task for CSLID. Due to the low-resource nature of code-switching, we also employ careful silver data creation using monolingual corpora in both languages and up-sampling as data augmentation. We focus on English-Mandarin code-switched data, but our method works on any language pair. Our best model achieves a balanced accuracy of 0.781 on a real English-Mandarin code-switching child-directed speech corpus and outperforms the previous baseline by 55.3%., 8 pages, 3 figures, 7 tables

Lyrics recognition is an important task in music processing. Despite traditional algorithms such as the hybrid HMM- TDNN model achieving good performance, studies on applying end-to-end models and self-supervised learning (SSL) are limited. In this paper, we first establish an end-to-end baseline for lyrics recognition and then explore the performance of SSL models on lyrics recognition task. We evaluate a variety of upstream SSL models with different training methods (masked reconstruction, masked prediction, autoregressive reconstruction, and contrastive learning). Our end-to-end self-supervised models, evaluated on the DAMP music dataset, outperform the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) system by 5.23% for the dev set and 2.4% for the test set even without a language model trained by a large corpus. Moreover, we investigate the effect of background music on the performance of self-supervised learning models and conclude that the SSL models cannot extract features efficiently in the presence of background music. Finally, we study the out-of-domain generalization ability of the SSL features considering that those models were not trained on music datasets., 4 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables

The detection of abnormal fetal heartbeats during pregnancy is important for monitoring the health conditions of the fetus. While adult ECG has made several advances in modern medicine, noninvasive fetal electrocardiography (FECG) remains a great challenge. In this paper, we introduce a new method based on affine combinations of adaptive filters to extract FECG signals. The affine combination of multiple filters is able to precisely fit the reference signal, and thus obtain more accurate FECGs. We proposed a method to combine the Least Mean Square (LMS) and Recursive Least Squares (RLS) filters. Our approach found that the Combined Recursive Least Squares (CRLS) filter achieves the best performance among all proposed combinations. In addition, we found that CRLS is more advantageous in extracting FECG from abdominal electrocardiograms (AECG) with a small signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Compared with the state-of-the-art MSF-ANC method, CRLS shows improved performance. The sensitivity, accuracy, and F1 scores improved by 3.58%, 2.39%, and 1.36%, respectively., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables