MERaLiON-GR: Speech Gender Recognition Model for English and SEA Languages
Qiongqiong Wang, Ai Ti Aw, Nancy F. Chen, Ying Lay Chiu, Yang Ding, Yingxu He, Ridong Jiang, Zhuohan Liu, Yanfeng Lu, Yi Ma, Muhammad Huzaifah, Nabilah Binte Md Johan, Nattadaporn Lertcheva, Pham Minh Duc, Sailor Hardik Bhupendra, Siti Umairah Binte Mohammad Salleh, Shuo Sun, Tarun Kumar Vangani, Jeremy H. M. Wong, Jinyang Wu, Longyin Zhang
Abstract
We present MERaLiON-GR, a speech gender recognition system that performs binary classification (female / male) on English and Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. The model finetunes MERaLiON-SpeechEncoder-2, a large conformer based transformer pre-trained on a broad speech corpus, and applies parameter efficient fine-tuning via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to adapt the encoder to the gender recognition task, and appends a multi-scale ECAPA-TDNN down stream network with attention pooling and a lightweight linear classifier. Extensive evaluations across multilingual Singaporean and Southeast Asian languages (English, Chinese, Malay, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Khmer) show that MERaLiON-GR consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art gender recognition model Vox-Profile and a large Audio-LLM, in both full-utterance and segment level evaluation modes. The results underscore the value of dedicated speech models in achieving accurate paralinguistic understanding and strong cross-lingual generalization.
Create a lesson
Related papers
Monitoring and Discovering Reward Hacking with Internal Representations during LLM Evaluations
Leon Bergen, Usha Bhalla, Andrew Lee et al.
Reporting Practice Matters: The Impact of Reference Choice on Chest X-ray Report Evaluation
Daniel P. Jeong, Charles Q. Li, Hossein Hosseiny et al.
Long-Lived Characters, Local Inference: Incremental Memory Maintenance for Game NPCs
Zimu Xu
Beyond Outcomes: Dual-View Relational Learning for Efficient Agent Benchmarking
Xinshuai Guo, Junjie Wu, Dolly Deng et al.
How Much is a Human Right Worth? ECtHR-NPD: A Benchmark for Predicting Non-Pecuniary Damage Awards
Yanyi Pu, Damian A. Gonzalez-Salzberg, Zheng Yuan et al.
Structured Claim-Level Discourse Representations for Dense Health Narratives
Farnoushsadat Nilizadeh, Elham Pourabbas Vafa, Shirin Nilizadeh et al.