The international research workshop JSALT 2025 has concluded at FIT BUT

During the summer, the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology hosted the prestigious international research workshop JSALT 2025, organized by the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. The 32nd edition of the workshop brought together more than 100 researchers from 22 countries, making Brno a meeting ground for top experts in speech and language technologies. The workshop was preceded by a summer school aimed at deepening knowledge in these rapidly developing fields.

The core of the program was the scientific work of four research teams, which presented their findings during the final days of the workshop, all united under the theme of machine learning applied to human speech . The first team focused on improving large language models' ability to consistently follow assigned roles (doctor, advisor, etc.), demonstrating the importance of persona-based prompting and developing a sound synthesis framework for generating spoken dialogue using LLMs. The second team, working on language models with audio input, delivered new audio datasets across various domains to support model pre-training, along with a novel methodology for evaluating model response correctness. The third team concentrated on simplifying and improving speech recognition in complex scenarios and presented a new ASR transcription method that includes speaker diarization as a condition. The final team introduced a new toolkit for evaluating text-to-speech (TTS) systems in low-resource languages (such as Bengali, Kurdish, or Sarawak Malay) and provided new training and testing data for such languages.

Although the Czech Republic is a small country, it is one of the most important global centers in speech and language technologies , alongside the United States and China. The Czech, and specifically Brno-based, contribution to this field of artificial intelligence is undeniable, thanks to the Speech@FIT research group and individuals like Hynek Heřmanský, Jan Černocký, and Lukáš Burget. That is also why FIT in Královo Pole recently welcomed personalities such as Ricard Marxer (University of Toulon), Ramani Duraiswami (University of Maryland), Samuele Cornell (Carnegie Mellon University), Yannick Estève (Laboratoire d'Informatique d'Avignon), Fethi Bougares (Elyadata), and the main organizer of the event, Sanjeev Khudanpur (Johns Hopkins University).

The main goal of this prestigious event is, of course, to push the boundaries of research. However, perhaps the most essential outcome of JSALT lies in the support of international scientific collaboration and in establishing new human connections. “The workshop brings together talented people from around the world. And sometimes, within a year, a result emerges that turns existing technology on its head,” says Jan Černocký about the workshop’s impact. Many of today’s technologies have their roots in the research and collaborations that began at JSALT. A prime example is the automatic translation system used in tools like Google Translate.

A photo gallery from the final days of the workshop can be found here. Photos by Martin Horný.

Source: Faculty of Information Technology

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Published	2025-08-06 08:10
Link	https://www.vut.cz/en/but/f19528/d298417