Named after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, Argus watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.
Signal 12 reports a POSITIVE finding on deep-learning-based automatic Quran pronunciation error detection and correction, showing the core technical capability now works reliably. Signal 35 shows simultaneous multilingual multimodal translation is achievable in open-source models, making localized feedback economically viable. Mobile penetration in key markets (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, West Africa) has reached the point where a smartphone-only delivery model covers the vast majority of the target audience.
Millions of Quran learners—and by extension learners of other rule-governed oral traditions such as Sanskrit, classical Arabic, and Vedic chanting—have no scalable, real-time pronunciation feedback system; human teachers are scarce and session time is limited.
Muslim learners of Quranic recitation globally (estimated 1.8B potential users), teachers of Islamic education, and by extension learners of other highly codified oral-religious or classical-language traditions
A mobile pronunciation-assessment platform that uses deep-learning ASR fine-tuned on Tajweed rules (signal 12) to give learners immediate, rule-specific feedback on recitation errors—identifying not just that a phoneme was wrong but which of the ~70 Tajweed rules was violated and offering targeted drill exercises. The system also generates multilingual corrective explanations (leveraging signal 35's multilingual multimodal translation work) so learners in non-Arabic-speaking countries receive feedback in their native language.
The real-world evidence the pipeline drew on to generate this idea.
arXiv:2509.00094v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Assessing spoken language is challenging, and quantifying pronunciation metrics for machine learning models is even harder. However, for the Holy Quran, this task is enabled by the rigorous recitation rules (Tajweed) established through the efforts of Muslim scholars, making highly effective assessment possible. Despite this advantage, the scarcity of high-quality annotated data remains a significant barrier. In this work, we bridge these gaps by introducing: (1) A 98% automated pipeline to produce high-quality Quranic datasets -- encompassing collection of recitations from expert reciters, segmentation at pause points (waqf) using our fine-tuned wav2vec2-BERT model, transcription of segments, and transcript verification via our novel Tasmeea algorithm; (2) 848 hours of audio (286K annotated utterances); (3) qdat_bench, a benchmark covering phonemes, diacritization, and Tajweed rules (Ghunnah, Qalqalah, Madd) on real recitation
arXiv:2512.00234v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: There has been significant progress in open-source text-only translation large language models (LLMs) with better language coverage and quality. However, these models can be only used in cascaded pipelines for speech translation (ST), performing automatic speech recognition first followed by translation. This introduces additional latency, which is particularly critical in simultaneous ST (SimulST), and prevents the model from exploiting multimodal context, such as images, which can aid disambiguation. Pretrained multimodal foundation models (MMFMs) already possess strong perception and reasoning capabilities across multiple modalities, but generally lack the multilingual coverage and specialized translation performance of dedicated translation LLMs. To build an effective multimodal translation system, we propose an end-to-end approach that fuses MMFMs with translation LLMs. We introduce a novel fusion strategy that connects hidden st
arXiv:2511.07011v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: Remotely captured spoken language could provide objective, regular indicators of depression symptom severity. However, research to date has largely used non-clinical, cross-sectional written language and complex machine learning (ML) approaches with limited interpretability. Methods: We used linear mixed-effect models to identify interpretable lexical features associated with symptom severity in data from the RADAR-MDD study that comprised 5,846 smartphone recordings and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-8) scores from 467 participants in the UK, Netherlands and Spain. We then developed ML models and systematically assessed via nested cross-validation whether interpretable lexical features or high-dimensional vector embeddings improved the accuracy of PHQ-8 prediction over sociodemographic and confounding features. Results: Depression symptom severity was associated with five lexical features, including reductions in word
arXiv:2608.28508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forced alignment evaluation typically requires manually annotated timestamps, limiting large-scale and multilingual analysis. We introduce two corpus-level metrics based on self-supervised (SSL) speech representations for reference-free forced alignment evaluation: Phoneme-Cluster Mutual Information (PCMI) and Word Acoustic Consistency Score (WACS). PCMI measures agreement between aligned phoneme labels and clusters induced from SSL-speech representations, while WACS measures consistency of repeated word realizations using dynamic time warping similarity between word representation sequences. Using both random and systematic perturbations, we show that PCMI and WACS degrade consistently under alignment perturbations. We further analyze the metrics across multiple alignment systems on 85 languages from FLEURS, validate them against manually annotated alignments from 45 languages in DoReCo, and evaluate them on two phonologically complex lo
arXiv:2603.17070v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we analyze shortcomings in cross-lingual knowledge transfer in large, modern reasoning LLMs. We demonstrate that the perceived gap in knowledge transfer is primarily a script barrier. First, we conduct an observational data analysis on the performance of thinking models on two datasets with local knowledge from around the world, ECLeKTic and MultiLoKo. Our regression analysis shows that script match - not language or family - is the primary predictor of knowledge transfer failure once model capability and question difficulty are accounted for. We further this finding by providing the LLMs with the key entities of the questions in their source language and find that this disproportionately improves cross-script questions. We then posit that these LLMs could be reasoning better at test-time. To evaluate this, we develop a synthetic generation pipeline to design SFT samples to encourage the model to better reason about tran