Publications

2025

1. Leveraging ASR and LLMs for Automated Scoring and Feedback in Children’s Spoken Language Assessments

   Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Kaiyuan Zhang, Andre Mai, and 5 more authors

   In Proc. 10th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE) 2025
2. An Age-Agnostic System for Robust Speaker Verification

   Jiusi Zheng, Vishwas Shetty, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, and 1 more author

   In Proc. 7th Workshop on Child Computer Interaction (WOCCI 2025) 2025
3. Benchmarking Training Paradigms, Dataset Composition, and Model Scaling for Child ASR in ESPnet

   Anyu Ying, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Chyi-Jiunn Lin, and 7 more authors

   In Proc. 7th Workshop on Child Computer Interaction (WOCCI 2025) 2025
4. CHSER: A Dataset and Case Study on Generative Speech Error Correction for Child ASR

   Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Zilai Wang, Kaiyuan Zhang, and 2 more authors

   Proc. INTERSPEECH 2025 2025
5. Addressing Bias in Spoken Language Systems Used in the Development and Implementation of Automated Child Language-Based Assessment

   Alison L. Bailey, Alexander Johnson, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, and 3 more authors

   Journal of Educational Measurement 2025
6. Selective Attention Merging for Low Resource Tasks: A Case Study of Child ASR

   Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Zilai Wang, Eray Eren, and 1 more author

   ICASSP 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2025

2024

1. The JIBO Kids Corpus: A speech dataset of child-robot interactions in a classroom environment

   Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Amber Afshan, Alexander Johnson, and 9 more authors

   JASA Express Letters Nov 2024
2. Benchmarking Children’s ASR with Supervised and Self-supervised Speech Foundation Models

   Ruchao Fan, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, and Abeer Alwan

   Proc. INTERSPEECH 2024 Nov 2024
3. Large Language Model-based Pipeline for Item Difficulty and Response Time Estimation for Educational Assessments

   Hariram Veeramani, Surendrabikram Thapa, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, and 1 more author

   NAACL 2024 Workshops - Proceedings of the Nineteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA) Nov 2024
4. SOA: Reducing Domain Mismatch in SSL Pipeline by Speech Only Adaptation for Low Resource ASR

   Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Ruchao Fan, and Abeer Alwan

   2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops (ICASSPW) Nov 2024
5. An exploratory study on dialect density estimation for children and adult’s African American English

   Alexander Johnson, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Mari Ostendorf, and 1 more author

   The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Nov 2024
6. CORAAL QA: A Dataset and Framework for Open Domain Spontaneous Speech Question Answering from Long Audio Files

   Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Alexander Johnson, Christina Chance, and 2 more authors

   In ICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) Nov 2024
7. UniEnc-CASSNAT: An Encoder-Only Non-Autoregressive ASR for Speech SSL Models

   Ruchao Fan, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, and Abeer Alwan

   IEEE Signal Processing Letters Nov 2024

2023

1. An Analysis of Large Language Models for African American English Speaking Children’s Oral Language Assessment

   Alexander Johnson, Christina Chance, Kaycee Stiemke, and 3 more authors

   Journal of Black Excellence in Engineering, Science, & Technology Nov 2023
2. An Equitable Framework for Automatically Assessing Children’s Oral Narrative Language Abilities

   Alexander Johnson, Hariram Veeramani, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, and 1 more author

   In Proc. INTERSPEECH 2023 Nov 2023
3. Towards Automatically Assessing Children’s Oral Picture Description Tasks

   Hariram Veeramani, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Alexander Johnson, and 1 more author

   In Proc. 9th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE) Nov 2023

2020

1. A hybrid feature preservation technique based on luminosity and edge based contrast enhancement in color fundus images

   Gopinath Palanisamy, Natarajan B Shankar, Palanisamy Ponnusamy, and 1 more author

   Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering Nov 2020