Identifying Filled Pauses in Speech Across South and West Slavic Languages

Filled pauses are among the most common paralinguistic features of speech, yet they are mainly omitted from transcripts.We propose a transformer-based approach for detecting filled pauses directly from the speech signal, finetuned on Slovenian and evaluated across South and West Slavic languages.Our results show that speech transformers achieve excellent performance in detecting filled pauses when evaluated in the in-language scenario.We further evaluate cross-lingual capabilities of the model on two closely related South Slavic languages (Croatian and Serbian) and two less closely related West Slavic languages (Czech and Polish).Our results reveal strong cross-lingual generalization capabilities of the model, with only minor performance drops.Moreover, error analysis reveals that the model outperforms human annotators in recall and F1 score, while trailing slightly in precision.In addition to evaluating the capabilities of speech transformers for filled pause detection across Slavic languages, we release new multilingual test datasets and make our fine-tuned model publicly available to support further research and applications in spoken language processing.