A summary of the 2012 JHU CLSP Workshop on Zero Resource Speech Technologies and Models of Early Language Acquisition

We summarize the accomplishments of a multi-disciplinary workshop exploring the computational and scientific issues surrounding zero resource (unsupervised) speech technologies and related models of early language acquisition. Centered around the tasks of phonetic and lexical discovery, we consider unified evaluation metrics, present two new approaches for improving speaker independence in the absence of supervision, and evaluate the application of Bayesian word segmentation algorithms to automatic subword unit tokenizations. Finally, we present two strategies for integrating zero resource techniques into supervised settings, demonstrating the potential of unsupervised methods to improve mainstream technologies.5 page(s

Nonparametric Bayesian Double Articulation Analyzer for Direct Language Acquisition from Continuous Speech Signals

Human infants can discover words directly from unsegmented speech signals without any explicitly labeled data. In this paper, we develop a novel machine learning method called nonparametric Bayesian double articulation analyzer (NPB-DAA) that can directly acquire language and acoustic models from observed continuous speech signals. For this purpose, we propose an integrative generative model that combines a language model and an acoustic model into a single generative model called the "hierarchical Dirichlet process hidden language model" (HDP-HLM). The HDP-HLM is obtained by extending the hierarchical Dirichlet process hidden semi-Markov model (HDP-HSMM) proposed by Johnson et al. An inference procedure for the HDP-HLM is derived using the blocked Gibbs sampler originally proposed for the HDP-HSMM. This procedure enables the simultaneous and direct inference of language and acoustic models from continuous speech signals. Based on the HDP-HLM and its inference procedure, we developed a novel double articulation analyzer. By assuming HDP-HLM as a generative model of observed time series data, and by inferring latent variables of the model, the method can analyze latent double articulation structure, i.e., hierarchically organized latent words and phonemes, of the data in an unsupervised manner. The novel unsupervised double articulation analyzer is called NPB-DAA. The NPB-DAA can automatically estimate double articulation structure embedded in speech signals. We also carried out two evaluation experiments using synthetic data and actual human continuous speech signals representing Japanese vowel sequences. In the word acquisition and phoneme categorization tasks, the NPB-DAA outperformed a conventional double articulation analyzer (DAA) and baseline automatic speech recognition system whose acoustic model was trained in a supervised manner.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, Draft submitted to IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development (TAMD

An Empirical Evaluation of Zero Resource Acoustic Unit Discovery

Acoustic unit discovery (AUD) is a process of automatically identifying a categorical acoustic unit inventory from speech and producing corresponding acoustic unit tokenizations. AUD provides an important avenue for unsupervised acoustic model training in a zero resource setting where expert-provided linguistic knowledge and transcribed speech are unavailable. Therefore, to further facilitate zero-resource AUD process, in this paper, we demonstrate acoustic feature representations can be significantly improved by (i) performing linear discriminant analysis (LDA) in an unsupervised self-trained fashion, and (ii) leveraging resources of other languages through building a multilingual bottleneck (BN) feature extractor to give effective cross-lingual generalization. Moreover, we perform comprehensive evaluations of AUD efficacy on multiple downstream speech applications, and their correlated performance suggests that AUD evaluations are feasible using different alternative language resources when only a subset of these evaluation resources can be available in typical zero resource applications.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure; Accepted for publication at ICASSP 201

Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

Topic Identification for Speech without ASR

Modern topic identification (topic ID) systems for speech use automatic speech recognition (ASR) to produce speech transcripts, and perform supervised classification on such ASR outputs. However, under resource-limited conditions, the manually transcribed speech required to develop standard ASR systems can be severely limited or unavailable. In this paper, we investigate alternative unsupervised solutions to obtaining tokenizations of speech in terms of a vocabulary of automatically discovered word-like or phoneme-like units, without depending on the supervised training of ASR systems. Moreover, using automatic phoneme-like tokenizations, we demonstrate that a convolutional neural network based framework for learning spoken document representations provides competitive performance compared to a standard bag-of-words representation, as evidenced by comprehensive topic ID evaluations on both single-label and multi-label classification tasks.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; accepted for publication at Interspeech 201

Bayesian Models for Unit Discovery on a Very Low Resource Language

Developing speech technologies for low-resource languages has become a very active research field over the last decade. Among others, Bayesian models have shown some promising results on artificial examples but still lack of in situ experiments. Our work applies state-of-the-art Bayesian models to unsupervised Acoustic Unit Discovery (AUD) in a real low-resource language scenario. We also show that Bayesian models can naturally integrate information from other resourceful languages by means of informative prior leading to more consistent discovered units. Finally, discovered acoustic units are used, either as the 1-best sequence or as a lattice, to perform word segmentation. Word segmentation results show that this Bayesian approach clearly outperforms a Segmental-DTW baseline on the same corpus.Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 201

Nonparametric Dark Energy Reconstruction from Supernova Data

Understanding the origin of the accelerated expansion of the Universe poses one of the greatest challenges in physics today. Lacking a compelling fundamental theory to test, observational efforts are targeted at a better characterization of the underlying cause. If a new form of mass-energy, dark energy, is driving the acceleration, the redshift evolution of the equation of state parameter w(z) will hold essential clues as to its origin. To best exploit data from observations it is necessary to develop a robust and accurate reconstruction approach, with controlled errors, for w(z). We introduce a new, nonparametric method for solving the associated statistical inverse problem based on Gaussian Process modeling and Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Applying this method to recent supernova measurements, we reconstruct the continuous history of w out to redshift z=1.5.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter