3,116 research outputs found
Adversarial Speaker Adaptation
We propose a novel adversarial speaker adaptation (ASA) scheme, in which
adversarial learning is applied to regularize the distribution of deep hidden
features in a speaker-dependent (SD) deep neural network (DNN) acoustic model
to be close to that of a fixed speaker-independent (SI) DNN acoustic model
during adaptation. An additional discriminator network is introduced to
distinguish the deep features generated by the SD model from those produced by
the SI model. In ASA, with a fixed SI model as the reference, an SD model is
jointly optimized with the discriminator network to minimize the senone
classification loss, and simultaneously to mini-maximize the SI/SD
discrimination loss on the adaptation data. With ASA, a senone-discriminative
deep feature is learned in the SD model with a similar distribution to that of
the SI model. With such a regularized and adapted deep feature, the SD model
can perform improved automatic speech recognition on the target speaker's
speech. Evaluated on the Microsoft short message dictation dataset, ASA
achieves 14.4% and 7.9% relative word error rate improvements for supervised
and unsupervised adaptation, respectively, over an SI model trained from 2600
hours data, with 200 adaptation utterances per speaker.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, ICASSP 201
DNN adaptation by automatic quality estimation of ASR hypotheses
In this paper we propose to exploit the automatic Quality Estimation (QE) of
ASR hypotheses to perform the unsupervised adaptation of a deep neural network
modeling acoustic probabilities. Our hypothesis is that significant
improvements can be achieved by: i)automatically transcribing the evaluation
data we are currently trying to recognise, and ii) selecting from it a subset
of "good quality" instances based on the word error rate (WER) scores predicted
by a QE component. To validate this hypothesis, we run several experiments on
the evaluation data sets released for the CHiME-3 challenge. First, we operate
in oracle conditions in which manual transcriptions of the evaluation data are
available, thus allowing us to compute the "true" sentence WER. In this
scenario, we perform the adaptation with variable amounts of data, which are
characterised by different levels of quality. Then, we move to realistic
conditions in which the manual transcriptions of the evaluation data are not
available. In this case, the adaptation is performed on data selected according
to the WER scores "predicted" by a QE component. Our results indicate that: i)
QE predictions allow us to closely approximate the adaptation results obtained
in oracle conditions, and ii) the overall ASR performance based on the proposed
QE-driven adaptation method is significantly better than the strong, most
recent, CHiME-3 baseline.Comment: Computer Speech & Language December 201
Time-Contrastive Learning Based Deep Bottleneck Features for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification
There are a number of studies about extraction of bottleneck (BN) features
from deep neural networks (DNNs)trained to discriminate speakers, pass-phrases
and triphone states for improving the performance of text-dependent speaker
verification (TD-SV). However, a moderate success has been achieved. A recent
study [1] presented a time contrastive learning (TCL) concept to explore the
non-stationarity of brain signals for classification of brain states. Speech
signals have similar non-stationarity property, and TCL further has the
advantage of having no need for labeled data. We therefore present a TCL based
BN feature extraction method. The method uniformly partitions each speech
utterance in a training dataset into a predefined number of multi-frame
segments. Each segment in an utterance corresponds to one class, and class
labels are shared across utterances. DNNs are then trained to discriminate all
speech frames among the classes to exploit the temporal structure of speech. In
addition, we propose a segment-based unsupervised clustering algorithm to
re-assign class labels to the segments. TD-SV experiments were conducted on the
RedDots challenge database. The TCL-DNNs were trained using speech data of
fixed pass-phrases that were excluded from the TD-SV evaluation set, so the
learned features can be considered phrase-independent. We compare the
performance of the proposed TCL bottleneck (BN) feature with those of
short-time cepstral features and BN features extracted from DNNs discriminating
speakers, pass-phrases, speaker+pass-phrase, as well as monophones whose labels
and boundaries are generated by three different automatic speech recognition
(ASR) systems. Experimental results show that the proposed TCL-BN outperforms
cepstral features and speaker+pass-phrase discriminant BN features, and its
performance is on par with those of ASR derived BN features. Moreover,....Comment: Copyright (c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted.
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Semi-Supervised Speech Emotion Recognition with Ladder Networks
Speech emotion recognition (SER) systems find applications in various fields
such as healthcare, education, and security and defense. A major drawback of
these systems is their lack of generalization across different conditions. This
problem can be solved by training models on large amounts of labeled data from
the target domain, which is expensive and time-consuming. Another approach is
to increase the generalization of the models. An effective way to achieve this
goal is by regularizing the models through multitask learning (MTL), where
auxiliary tasks are learned along with the primary task. These methods often
require the use of labeled data which is computationally expensive to collect
for emotion recognition (gender, speaker identity, age or other emotional
descriptors). This study proposes the use of ladder networks for emotion
recognition, which utilizes an unsupervised auxiliary task. The primary task is
a regression problem to predict emotional attributes. The auxiliary task is the
reconstruction of intermediate feature representations using a denoising
autoencoder. This auxiliary task does not require labels so it is possible to
train the framework in a semi-supervised fashion with abundant unlabeled data
from the target domain. This study shows that the proposed approach creates a
powerful framework for SER, achieving superior performance than fully
supervised single-task learning (STL) and MTL baselines. The approach is
implemented with several acoustic features, showing that ladder networks
generalize significantly better in cross-corpus settings. Compared to the STL
baselines, the proposed approach achieves relative gains in concordance
correlation coefficient (CCC) between 3.0% and 3.5% for within corpus
evaluations, and between 16.1% and 74.1% for cross corpus evaluations,
highlighting the power of the architecture
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