1,118 research outputs found
Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Phoneme Segmentation
We propose a self-supervised representation learning model for the task of
unsupervised phoneme boundary detection. The model is a convolutional neural
network that operates directly on the raw waveform. It is optimized to identify
spectral changes in the signal using the Noise-Contrastive Estimation
principle. At test time, a peak detection algorithm is applied over the model
outputs to produce the final boundaries. As such, the proposed model is trained
in a fully unsupervised manner with no manual annotations in the form of target
boundaries nor phonetic transcriptions. We compare the proposed approach to
several unsupervised baselines using both TIMIT and Buckeye corpora. Results
suggest that our approach surpasses the baseline models and reaches
state-of-the-art performance on both data sets. Furthermore, we experimented
with expanding the training set with additional examples from the Librispeech
corpus. We evaluated the resulting model on distributions and languages that
were not seen during the training phase (English, Hebrew and German) and showed
that utilizing additional untranscribed data is beneficial for model
performance.Comment: Interspeech 2020 pape
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
ModDrop: adaptive multi-modal gesture recognition
We present a method for gesture detection and localisation based on
multi-scale and multi-modal deep learning. Each visual modality captures
spatial information at a particular spatial scale (such as motion of the upper
body or a hand), and the whole system operates at three temporal scales. Key to
our technique is a training strategy which exploits: i) careful initialization
of individual modalities; and ii) gradual fusion involving random dropping of
separate channels (dubbed ModDrop) for learning cross-modality correlations
while preserving uniqueness of each modality-specific representation. We
present experiments on the ChaLearn 2014 Looking at People Challenge gesture
recognition track, in which we placed first out of 17 teams. Fusing multiple
modalities at several spatial and temporal scales leads to a significant
increase in recognition rates, allowing the model to compensate for errors of
the individual classifiers as well as noise in the separate channels.
Futhermore, the proposed ModDrop training technique ensures robustness of the
classifier to missing signals in one or several channels to produce meaningful
predictions from any number of available modalities. In addition, we
demonstrate the applicability of the proposed fusion scheme to modalities of
arbitrary nature by experiments on the same dataset augmented with audio.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure
Spatial features of reverberant speech: estimation and application to recognition and diarization
Distant talking scenarios, such as hands-free calling or teleconference meetings, are essential for natural and comfortable human-machine interaction and they are being increasingly used in multiple contexts. The acquired speech signal in such scenarios is reverberant and affected by additive noise. This signal distortion degrades the performance of speech recognition and diarization systems creating troublesome human-machine interactions.This thesis proposes a method to non-intrusively estimate room acoustic parameters, paying special attention to a room acoustic parameter highly correlated with speech recognition degradation: clarity index. In addition, a method to provide information regarding the estimation accuracy is proposed. An analysis of the phoneme recognition performance for multiple reverberant environments is presented, from which a confusability metric for each phoneme is derived. This confusability metric is then employed to improve reverberant speech recognition performance. Additionally, room acoustic parameters can as well be used in speech recognition to provide robustness against reverberation. A method to exploit clarity index estimates in order to perform reverberant speech recognition is introduced.
Finally, room acoustic parameters can also be used to diarize reverberant speech. A room acoustic parameter is proposed to be used as an additional source of information for single-channel diarization purposes in reverberant environments. In multi-channel environments, the time delay of arrival is a feature commonly used to diarize the input speech, however the computation of this feature is affected by reverberation. A method is presented to model the time delay of arrival in a robust manner so that speaker diarization is more accurately performed.Open Acces
Fast Speech in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis
Moers-Prinz D. Fast Speech in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2020.Speech synthesis is part of the everyday life of many people with severe visual disabilities. For those who are reliant on assistive speech technology the possibility to choose a fast speaking rate is reported to be essential. But also expressive speech synthesis and other spoken language interfaces may require an integration of fast speech. Architectures like formant or diphone synthesis are able to produce synthetic speech at fast speech rates, but the generated speech does not sound very natural. Unit selection synthesis systems, however, are capable of delivering more natural output. Nevertheless, fast speech has not been adequately implemented into such systems to date. Thus, the goal of the work presented here was to determine an optimal strategy for modeling fast speech in unit selection speech synthesis to provide potential users with a more natural sounding alternative for fast speech output
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