Integrating Prosodic and Lexical Cues for Automatic Topic Segmentation

We present a probabilistic model that uses both prosodic and lexical cues for the automatic segmentation of speech into topically coherent units. We propose two methods for combining lexical and prosodic information using hidden Markov models and decision trees. Lexical information is obtained from a speech recognizer, and prosodic features are extracted automatically from speech waveforms. We evaluate our approach on the Broadcast News corpus, using the DARPA-TDT evaluation metrics. Results show that the prosodic model alone is competitive with word-based segmentation methods. Furthermore, we achieve a significant reduction in error by combining the prosodic and word-based knowledge sources.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure

Anti-spoofing Methods for Automatic SpeakerVerification System

Growing interest in automatic speaker verification (ASV)systems has lead to significant quality improvement of spoofing attackson them. Many research works confirm that despite the low equal er-ror rate (EER) ASV systems are still vulnerable to spoofing attacks. Inthis work we overview different acoustic feature spaces and classifiersto determine reliable and robust countermeasures against spoofing at-tacks. We compared several spoofing detection systems, presented so far,on the development and evaluation datasets of the Automatic SpeakerVerification Spoofing and Countermeasures (ASVspoof) Challenge 2015.Experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate that the useof magnitude and phase information combination provides a substantialinput into the efficiency of the spoofing detection systems. Also wavelet-based features show impressive results in terms of equal error rate. Inour overview we compare spoofing performance for systems based on dif-ferent classifiers. Comparison results demonstrate that the linear SVMclassifier outperforms the conventional GMM approach. However, manyresearchers inspired by the great success of deep neural networks (DNN)approaches in the automatic speech recognition, applied DNN in thespoofing detection task and obtained quite low EER for known and un-known type of spoofing attacks.Comment: 12 pages, 0 figures, published in Springer Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) vol. 66

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

A Fully Convolutional Deep Auditory Model for Musical Chord Recognition

Chord recognition systems depend on robust feature extraction pipelines. While these pipelines are traditionally hand-crafted, recent advances in end-to-end machine learning have begun to inspire researchers to explore data-driven methods for such tasks. In this paper, we present a chord recognition system that uses a fully convolutional deep auditory model for feature extraction. The extracted features are processed by a Conditional Random Field that decodes the final chord sequence. Both processing stages are trained automatically and do not require expert knowledge for optimising parameters. We show that the learned auditory system extracts musically interpretable features, and that the proposed chord recognition system achieves results on par or better than state-of-the-art algorithms.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE 26th International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), Vietro sul Mare, Ital

Deep Clustering and Conventional Networks for Music Separation: Stronger Together

Deep clustering is the first method to handle general audio separation scenarios with multiple sources of the same type and an arbitrary number of sources, performing impressively in speaker-independent speech separation tasks. However, little is known about its effectiveness in other challenging situations such as music source separation. Contrary to conventional networks that directly estimate the source signals, deep clustering generates an embedding for each time-frequency bin, and separates sources by clustering the bins in the embedding space. We show that deep clustering outperforms conventional networks on a singing voice separation task, in both matched and mismatched conditions, even though conventional networks have the advantage of end-to-end training for best signal approximation, presumably because its more flexible objective engenders better regularization. Since the strengths of deep clustering and conventional network architectures appear complementary, we explore combining them in a single hybrid network trained via an approach akin to multi-task learning. Remarkably, the combination significantly outperforms either of its components.Comment: Published in ICASSP 201