24,179 research outputs found
Speech vocoding for laboratory phonology
Using phonological speech vocoding, we propose a platform for exploring
relations between phonology and speech processing, and in broader terms, for
exploring relations between the abstract and physical structures of a speech
signal. Our goal is to make a step towards bridging phonology and speech
processing and to contribute to the program of Laboratory Phonology. We show
three application examples for laboratory phonology: compositional phonological
speech modelling, a comparison of phonological systems and an experimental
phonological parametric text-to-speech (TTS) system. The featural
representations of the following three phonological systems are considered in
this work: (i) Government Phonology (GP), (ii) the Sound Pattern of English
(SPE), and (iii) the extended SPE (eSPE). Comparing GP- and eSPE-based vocoded
speech, we conclude that the latter achieves slightly better results than the
former. However, GP - the most compact phonological speech representation -
performs comparably to the systems with a higher number of phonological
features. The parametric TTS based on phonological speech representation, and
trained from an unlabelled audiobook in an unsupervised manner, achieves
intelligibility of 85% of the state-of-the-art parametric speech synthesis. We
envision that the presented approach paves the way for researchers in both
fields to form meaningful hypotheses that are explicitly testable using the
concepts developed and exemplified in this paper. On the one hand, laboratory
phonologists might test the applied concepts of their theoretical models, and
on the other hand, the speech processing community may utilize the concepts
developed for the theoretical phonological models for improvements of the
current state-of-the-art applications
Learning with Latent Language
The named concepts and compositional operators present in natural language
provide a rich source of information about the kinds of abstractions humans use
to navigate the world. Can this linguistic background knowledge improve the
generality and efficiency of learned classifiers and control policies? This
paper aims to show that using the space of natural language strings as a
parameter space is an effective way to capture natural task structure. In a
pretraining phase, we learn a language interpretation model that transforms
inputs (e.g. images) into outputs (e.g. labels) given natural language
descriptions. To learn a new concept (e.g. a classifier), we search directly in
the space of descriptions to minimize the interpreter's loss on training
examples. Crucially, our models do not require language data to learn these
concepts: language is used only in pretraining to impose structure on
subsequent learning. Results on image classification, text editing, and
reinforcement learning show that, in all settings, models with a linguistic
parameterization outperform those without
Quantitative multi-objective verification for probabilistic systems
We present a verification framework for analysing multiple quantitative objectives of systems that exhibit both nondeterministic and stochastic behaviour. These systems are modelled as probabilistic automata, enriched with cost or reward structures that capture, for example, energy usage or performance metrics. Quantitative properties of these models are expressed in a specification language that incorporates probabilistic safety and liveness properties, expected total cost or reward, and supports multiple objectives of these types. We propose and implement an efficient verification framework for such properties and then present two distinct applications of it: firstly, controller synthesis subject to multiple quantitative objectives; and, secondly, quantitative compositional verification. The practical applicability of both approaches is illustrated with experimental results from several large case studies
An algorithm for weak synthesis observation equivalence for compositional supervisor synthesis
This paper proposes an algorithm to simplify automata in such a way that compositional synthesis results are preserved in every possible context. It relaxes some requirements of synthesis observation equivalence from previous work, so that better abstractions can be obtained. The paper describes the algorithm, adapted from known bisimulation equivalence algorithms, for the improved abstraction method. The algorithm has been implemented in the DES software tool Supremica and has been used to compute modular supervisors for several large benchmark examples. It successfully computes modular supervisors for systems with more than 1012 reachable states
Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands
To understand diverse natural language commands, virtual assistants today are
trained with numerous labor-intensive, manually annotated sentences. This paper
presents a methodology and the Genie toolkit that can handle new compound
commands with significantly less manual effort. We advocate formalizing the
capability of virtual assistants with a Virtual Assistant Programming Language
(VAPL) and using a neural semantic parser to translate natural language into
VAPL code. Genie needs only a small realistic set of input sentences for
validating the neural model. Developers write templates to synthesize data;
Genie uses crowdsourced paraphrases and data augmentation, along with the
synthesized data, to train a semantic parser. We also propose design principles
that make VAPL languages amenable to natural language translation. We apply
these principles to revise ThingTalk, the language used by the Almond virtual
assistant. We use Genie to build the first semantic parser that can support
compound virtual assistants commands with unquoted free-form parameters. Genie
achieves a 62% accuracy on realistic user inputs. We demonstrate Genie's
generality by showing a 19% and 31% improvement over the previous state of the
art on a music skill, aggregate functions, and access control.Comment: To appear in PLDI 201
Machine-Checked Proofs For Realizability Checking Algorithms
Virtual integration techniques focus on building architectural models of
systems that can be analyzed early in the design cycle to try to lower cost,
reduce risk, and improve quality of complex embedded systems. Given appropriate
architectural descriptions, assume/guarantee contracts, and compositional
reasoning rules, these techniques can be used to prove important safety
properties about the architecture prior to system construction. For these
proofs to be meaningful, each leaf-level component contract must be realizable;
i.e., it is possible to construct a component such that for any input allowed
by the contract assumptions, there is some output value that the component can
produce that satisfies the contract guarantees. We have recently proposed (in
[1]) a contract-based realizability checking algorithm for assume/guarantee
contracts over infinite theories supported by SMT solvers such as linear
integer/real arithmetic and uninterpreted functions. In that work, we used an
SMT solver and an algorithm similar to k-induction to establish the
realizability of a contract, and justified our approach via a hand proof. Given
the central importance of realizability to our virtual integration approach, we
wanted additional confidence that our approach was sound. This paper describes
a complete formalization of the approach in the Coq proof and specification
language. During formalization, we found several small mistakes and missing
assumptions in our reasoning. Although these did not compromise the correctness
of the algorithm used in the checking tools, they point to the value of
machine-checked formalization. In addition, we believe this is the first
machine-checked formalization for a realizability algorithm.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur
- ā¦