Dear all,
Over the past four years, researchers worldwide have entrusted the ExELang team http://exelang.fr/ led by Alex Cristia with their raw audio recordings (either through bilateral Data Transfer Agreements/Memoranda of Understanding, or through scientific archives), which allowed the development of several computational models. Today, we are writing to you about one called BabyHuBERT.
BabyHuBERT is a speech representation model, a sort of “jack of all trades” that can then be specialized to solve a specific task, such as voice type classification. The release of this model raised some important ethical questions. To get a non-technical introduction to BabyHuBERT and learn about our approach to its ethics, check out the slides https://osf.io/n75rs/files/3hqzv and video recording https://osf.io/n75rs/files/jaume (also available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inWK5YVET9Q&t=2s) of a talk Alex gave recently for some researchers who had shared their data with us.
The technical description of the model has been reported on "BabyHuBERT: Multilingual Self-Supervised Learning for Segmenting Speakers in Child-Centered Long-Form Recordings" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15001), recently accepted at Interspeech. For those interested in potentially using the model, we invite you to visit this OSF Link https://osf.io/n75rs/overview, which includes:
- A PDF with the documents surrounding the decisions taken regarding the release https://osf.io/n75rs/files/964df - The BabyHuBERT License v1.0 https://osf.io/b79v4- An introduction to BabyHuBERT https://osf.io/n75rs/files/anx9v, a FAQ https://osf.io/n75rs/files/u2nrf, and a process flow document https://osf.io/n75rs/files/a7t2y
Please feel free to reach out to Marvin Lavechin marvinlavechin@gmail.com if you have any questions!
Best,
The ExELang team
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