Muhammad Umar Farooq

I am a doctoral student at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield (UK) since 2021. I am working on multilingual speech recognition systems at LivePerson centre for Speech and Language Technologies (SLT) under supervision of Prof. Thomas Hain. My PhD reserach revolves around cross-lingual acoustic-phonetic similarities. Being part of LivePerson centre, I am also associated with Speech and Hearing (SPANDH), and Machine Intelligence for Natural Interfaces (MINI) reserach groups.

Alongside my PhD, I am also working as Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) for various modules at University of Sheffield. Currently, I am assisting teachers for Machine Learning and Adaptive Intelligence, and Data Science with Python. Please visit the teaching page for details.

Before enrolling for my Ph.D., I was a pre-doc research intern at Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL), Charles University, Prague. I primarily worked on speech related components of EU Horizon 2020 project European Live Translator (ELITR) supervised by Dr. Ondrej Bojar.

Prior to joining the UFAL, I have been working as speech processing Research Officer at Center for Language Engineering (CLE), University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Lahore. I joined CLE during my senior year as a speech scientist to develop low resource language technologies in supervision of Dr. Sarmad Hussain. I received my M.Sc. and B.Sc. Electrical Engineering degrees from UET, Lahore in 2019 and 2017 respectively.

Selected Publications

Progressive Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for ASR Using Ensemble Models and Multi-stage Training

Rehan Ahmad, Muhammad Umar Farooq, and Thomas Hain

In accepted for ICASSP, 2024

Bib

@inproceedings{rehan24_icassp,
  author = {Ahmad, Rehan and Farooq, Muhammad Umar and Hain, Thomas},
  title = {{Progressive Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for ASR Using Ensemble Models and Multi-stage Training}},
  year = {2024},
  booktitle = {accepted for ICASSP},
}

MUST: A Multilingual Student-Teacher Learning Approach for Low-Resource Speech Recognition

Muhammad Umar Farooq, Rehan Ahmad, and Thomas Hain

In ASRU, 2023

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{farooq23_asru,
  author = {Farooq, Muhammad Umar and Ahmad, Rehan and Hain, Thomas},
  title = {{MUST: A Multilingual Student-Teacher Learning Approach for Low-Resource Speech Recognition}},
  year = {2023},
  booktitle = {ASRU},
}

Learning Cross-lingual Mappings for Data Augmentation to Improve Low-Resource Speech Recognition

Muhammad Umar Farooq, and Thomas Hain

In Proc. INTERSPEECH, 2023

Bib

@inproceedings{farooq23_interspeech,
  author = {Farooq, Muhammad Umar and Hain, Thomas},
  title = {{Learning Cross-lingual Mappings for Data Augmentation to Improve Low-Resource Speech Recognition}},
  year = {2023},
  booktitle = {Proc. INTERSPEECH},
  pages = {5072--5076},
  doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2023-1613},
}

Towards Domain Generalisation in ASR with Elitist Sampling and Ensemble Knowledge Distillation

Rehan Ahmad, Md Asif Jalal, Muhammad Umar Farooq, and 2 more authors

In ICASSP, 2023

Bib

@inproceedings{10095746,
  author = {Ahmad, Rehan and Jalal, Md Asif and Umar Farooq, Muhammad and Ollerenshaw, Anna and Hain, Thomas},
  booktitle = {ICASSP},
  title = {Towards Domain Generalisation in ASR with Elitist Sampling and Ensemble Knowledge Distillation},
  year = {2023},
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  pages = {1-5},
  doi = {10.1109/ICASSP49357.2023.10095746},
}

Investigating the Impact of Crosslingual Acoustic-Phonetic Similarities on Multilingual Speech Recognition

Muhammad Umar Farooq, and Thomas Hain

In Proc. Interspeech, 2022

Bib

@inproceedings{farooq22_interspeech,
  author = {Farooq, Muhammad Umar and Hain, Thomas},
  title = {{Investigating the Impact of Crosslingual Acoustic-Phonetic Similarities on Multilingual Speech Recognition}},
  year = {2022},
  booktitle = {Proc. Interspeech},
  pages = {3849--3853},
  doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10916},
}

Non-Linear Pairwise Language Mappings for Low-Resource Multilingual Acoustic Model Fusion

Muhammad Umar Farooq, Darshan Adiga Haniya Narayana, and Thomas Hain

In Proc. Interspeech, 2022

Bib

@inproceedings{farooq22b_interspeech,
  author = {Farooq, Muhammad Umar and Narayana, Darshan Adiga Haniya and Hain, Thomas},
  title = {{Non-Linear Pairwise Language Mappings for Low-Resource Multilingual Acoustic Model Fusion}},
  year = {2022},
  booktitle = {Proc. Interspeech},
  pages = {4850--4854},
  doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2022-11449},
}

Improving Large Vocabulary Urdu Speech Recognition System Using Deep Neural Networks

Muhammad Umar Farooq, Farah Adeeba, Sahar Rauf, and 1 more author

In Proc. Interspeech 2019, 2019

Bib

@inproceedings{farooq19_interspeech,
  author = {Farooq, Muhammad Umar and Adeeba, Farah and Rauf, Sahar and Hussain, Sarmad},
  title = {{Improving Large Vocabulary Urdu Speech Recognition System Using Deep Neural Networks}},
  year = {2019},
  booktitle = {Proc. Interspeech 2019},
  pages = {2978--2982},
  doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2629},
}