Speech Codec Probing from Semantic and Phonetic Perspectives
Speech tokenizers are essential for connecting speech to large language models (LLMs) in multimodal systems. Speech tokenizers are expected to preserve both semantic and acoustic information for downstream understanding and generation tasks. However, emerging evidence suggests that the term "semantic" in speech processing does not align with linguistic lexical-semantic, leading to a mismatch between speech and text modality. In this paper, we systematically analyze the information encoded by several widely used speech tokenizers, evaluating their lexical-semantic and phonetic content through three tasks. Our results show that current tokenizers primarily capture phonetic rather than lexic...
| Authors | Xuan Shi, Chang Zeng, Tiantian Feng et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | eess.AS |
| Published | 11 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 June 2026 |
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