2,134 research outputs found
Analyzing analytical methods: The case of phonology in neural models of spoken language
Given the fast development of analysis techniques for NLP and speech
processing systems, few systematic studies have been conducted to compare the
strengths and weaknesses of each method. As a step in this direction we study
the case of representations of phonology in neural network models of spoken
language. We use two commonly applied analytical techniques, diagnostic
classifiers and representational similarity analysis, to quantify to what
extent neural activation patterns encode phonemes and phoneme sequences. We
manipulate two factors that can affect the outcome of analysis. First, we
investigate the role of learning by comparing neural activations extracted from
trained versus randomly-initialized models. Second, we examine the temporal
scope of the activations by probing both local activations corresponding to a
few milliseconds of the speech signal, and global activations pooled over the
whole utterance. We conclude that reporting analysis results with randomly
initialized models is crucial, and that global-scope methods tend to yield more
consistent results and we recommend their use as a complement to local-scope
diagnostic methods.Comment: ACL 202
Spoken Language Intent Detection using Confusion2Vec
Decoding speaker's intent is a crucial part of spoken language understanding
(SLU). The presence of noise or errors in the text transcriptions, in real life
scenarios make the task more challenging. In this paper, we address the spoken
language intent detection under noisy conditions imposed by automatic speech
recognition (ASR) systems. We propose to employ confusion2vec word feature
representation to compensate for the errors made by ASR and to increase the
robustness of the SLU system. The confusion2vec, motivated from human speech
production and perception, models acoustic relationships between words in
addition to the semantic and syntactic relations of words in human language. We
hypothesize that ASR often makes errors relating to acoustically similar words,
and the confusion2vec with inherent model of acoustic relationships between
words is able to compensate for the errors. We demonstrate through experiments
on the ATIS benchmark dataset, the robustness of the proposed model to achieve
state-of-the-art results under noisy ASR conditions. Our system reduces
classification error rate (CER) by 20.84% and improves robustness by 37.48%
(lower CER degradation) relative to the previous state-of-the-art going from
clean to noisy transcripts. Improvements are also demonstrated when training
the intent detection models on noisy transcripts
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