Beyond Acoustic Sparsity and Linguistic Bias: A Prompt-Free Paradigm for Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis

Haopeng Geng; Longfei Yang; Xi Chen; Haitong Sun; Daisuke Saito; Nobuaki Minematsu

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arXiv · 2604.22133

Beyond Acoustic Sparsity and Linguistic Bias: A Prompt-Free Paradigm for Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis

Haopeng Geng·Longfei Yang·Xi Chen·Haitong Sun·Daisuke Saito·Nobuaki Minematsu

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Abstract

Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) requires modeling fine-grained acoustic deviations. However, current ASR-derived MDD systems often face inherent limitations. In particular, CTC-based models favor sequence-level alignments that neglect transient mispronunciation cues, while explicit canonical priors bias predictions toward intended targets. To address these bottlenecks, we propose a prompt-free framework decoupling acoustic fidelity from canonical guidance. First, we introduce CROTTC, an acoustic model enforcing monotonic, frame-level alignment to accurately capture pronunciation deviations. Second, we implicitly inject mispronunciation information via the IF strategy under the knowledge transfer principle. Experiments show CROTTC-IF achieves a 71.77% F1-score on L2-ARCTIC and 71.70% F1-score on the Iqra'Eval2 leaderboard. With empirical analysis, we demonstrate that decoupling acoustics from explicit priors provides highly robust MDD.

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Haopeng Geng, Longfei Yang, Xi Chen, Haitong Sun, Daisuke Saito, Nobuaki Minematsu. 2026-04-24. Beyond Acoustic Sparsity and Linguistic Bias: A Prompt-Free Paradigm for Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22133

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