Cross-Lingual Interleaving for Speech Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Moumen, Adel, Sun, Guangzhi, Woodland, Philip C.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866908841979936768
author Moumen, Adel
Sun, Guangzhi
Woodland, Philip C.
author_facet Moumen, Adel
Sun, Guangzhi
Woodland, Philip C.
contents Spoken Language Models (SLMs) aim to learn linguistic competence directly from speech using discrete units, widening access to Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies for languages with limited written resources. However, progress has been largely English-centric due to scarce spoken evaluation benchmarks and training data, making cross-lingual learning difficult. We present a cross-lingual interleaving method that mixes speech tokens across languages without textual supervision. We also release an EN-FR training dataset, TinyStories (~42k hours), together with EN-FR spoken StoryCloze and TopicCloze benchmarks for cross-lingual semantic evaluation, both synthetically generated using GPT-4. On 360M and 1B SLMs under matched training-token budgets, interleaving improves monolingual semantic accuracy, enables robust cross-lingual continuation, and strengthens cross-lingual hidden-state alignment. Taken together, these results indicate that cross-lingual interleaving is a simple, scalable route to building multilingual SLMs that understand and converse across languages. All resources will be made open-source to support reproducibility.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01865
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cross-Lingual Interleaving for Speech Language Models
Moumen, Adel
Sun, Guangzhi
Woodland, Philip C.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Spoken Language Models (SLMs) aim to learn linguistic competence directly from speech using discrete units, widening access to Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies for languages with limited written resources. However, progress has been largely English-centric due to scarce spoken evaluation benchmarks and training data, making cross-lingual learning difficult. We present a cross-lingual interleaving method that mixes speech tokens across languages without textual supervision. We also release an EN-FR training dataset, TinyStories (~42k hours), together with EN-FR spoken StoryCloze and TopicCloze benchmarks for cross-lingual semantic evaluation, both synthetically generated using GPT-4. On 360M and 1B SLMs under matched training-token budgets, interleaving improves monolingual semantic accuracy, enables robust cross-lingual continuation, and strengthens cross-lingual hidden-state alignment. Taken together, these results indicate that cross-lingual interleaving is a simple, scalable route to building multilingual SLMs that understand and converse across languages. All resources will be made open-source to support reproducibility.
title Cross-Lingual Interleaving for Speech Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01865