15,227 research outputs found
Joint morphological-lexical language modeling for processing morphologically rich languages with application to dialectal Arabic
Language modeling for an inflected language
such as Arabic poses new challenges for speech recognition and
machine translation due to its rich morphology. Rich morphology
results in large increases in out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rate and
poor language model parameter estimation in the absence of large
quantities of data. In this study, we present a joint
morphological-lexical language model (JMLLM) that takes
advantage of Arabic morphology. JMLLM combines
morphological segments with the underlying lexical items and
additional available information sources with regards to
morphological segments and lexical items in a single joint model.
Joint representation and modeling of morphological and lexical
items reduces the OOV rate and provides smooth probability
estimates while keeping the predictive power of whole words.
Speech recognition and machine translation experiments in
dialectal-Arabic show improvements over word and morpheme
based trigram language models. We also show that as the
tightness of integration between different information sources
increases, both speech recognition and machine translation
performances improve
Speaker segmentation and clustering
This survey focuses on two challenging speech processing topics, namely: speaker segmentation and speaker clustering. Speaker segmentation aims at finding speaker change points in an audio stream, whereas speaker clustering aims at grouping speech segments based on speaker characteristics. Model-based, metric-based, and hybrid speaker segmentation algorithms are reviewed. Concerning speaker clustering, deterministic and probabilistic algorithms are examined. A comparative assessment of the reviewed algorithms is undertaken, the algorithm advantages and disadvantages are indicated, insight to the algorithms is offered, and deductions as well as recommendations are given. Rich transcription and movie analysis are candidate applications that benefit from combined speaker segmentation and clustering. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Prosody-Based Automatic Segmentation of Speech into Sentences and Topics
A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction,
topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and
topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically
present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in
spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (information gleaned from
the timing and melody of speech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and
hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with word-based
approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadcast News and
Switchboard. Results show that the prosodic model alone performs on par with,
or better than, word-based statistical language models -- for both true and
automatically recognized words in news speech. The prosodic model achieves
comparable performance with significantly less training data, and requires no
hand-labeling of prosodic events. Across tasks and corpora, we obtain a
significant improvement over word-only models using a probabilistic combination
of prosodic and lexical information. Inspection reveals that the prosodic
models capture language-independent boundary indicators described in the
literature. Finally, cue usage is task and corpus dependent. For example, pause
and pitch features are highly informative for segmenting news speech, whereas
pause, duration and word-based cues dominate for natural conversation.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Speech Communication 32(1-2),
Special Issue on Accessing Information in Spoken Audio, September 200
An Unsupervised Approach for Automatic Activity Recognition based on Hidden Markov Model Regression
Using supervised machine learning approaches to recognize human activities
from on-body wearable accelerometers generally requires a large amount of
labelled data. When ground truth information is not available, too expensive,
time consuming or difficult to collect, one has to rely on unsupervised
approaches. This paper presents a new unsupervised approach for human activity
recognition from raw acceleration data measured using inertial wearable
sensors. The proposed method is based upon joint segmentation of
multidimensional time series using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) in a multiple
regression context. The model is learned in an unsupervised framework using the
Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm where no activity labels are needed.
The proposed method takes into account the sequential appearance of the data.
It is therefore adapted for the temporal acceleration data to accurately detect
the activities. It allows both segmentation and classification of the human
activities. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of
the proposed approach with respect to standard supervised and unsupervised
classification approache
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
Joint segmentation of multivariate time series with hidden process regression for human activity recognition
The problem of human activity recognition is central for understanding and
predicting the human behavior, in particular in a prospective of assistive
services to humans, such as health monitoring, well being, security, etc. There
is therefore a growing need to build accurate models which can take into
account the variability of the human activities over time (dynamic models)
rather than static ones which can have some limitations in such a dynamic
context. In this paper, the problem of activity recognition is analyzed through
the segmentation of the multidimensional time series of the acceleration data
measured in the 3-d space using body-worn accelerometers. The proposed model
for automatic temporal segmentation is a specific statistical latent process
model which assumes that the observed acceleration sequence is governed by
sequence of hidden (unobserved) activities. More specifically, the proposed
approach is based on a specific multiple regression model incorporating a
hidden discrete logistic process which governs the switching from one activity
to another over time. The model is learned in an unsupervised context by
maximizing the observed-data log-likelihood via a dedicated
expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. We applied it on a real-world
automatic human activity recognition problem and its performance was assessed
by performing comparisons with alternative approaches, including well-known
supervised static classifiers and the standard hidden Markov model (HMM). The
obtained results are very encouraging and show that the proposed approach is
quite competitive even it works in an entirely unsupervised way and does not
requires a feature extraction preprocessing step
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