633 research outputs found
Language Transfer of Audio Word2Vec: Learning Audio Segment Representations without Target Language Data
Audio Word2Vec offers vector representations of fixed dimensionality for
variable-length audio segments using Sequence-to-sequence Autoencoder (SA).
These vector representations are shown to describe the sequential phonetic
structures of the audio segments to a good degree, with real world applications
such as query-by-example Spoken Term Detection (STD). This paper examines the
capability of language transfer of Audio Word2Vec. We train SA from one
language (source language) and use it to extract the vector representation of
the audio segments of another language (target language). We found that SA can
still catch phonetic structure from the audio segments of the target language
if the source and target languages are similar. In query-by-example STD, we
obtain the vector representations from the SA learned from a large amount of
source language data, and found them surpass the representations from naive
encoder and SA directly learned from a small amount of target language data.
The result shows that it is possible to learn Audio Word2Vec model from
high-resource languages and use it on low-resource languages. This further
expands the usability of Audio Word2Vec.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1603.0098
Neural approaches to spoken content embedding
Comparing spoken segments is a central operation to speech processing.
Traditional approaches in this area have favored frame-level dynamic
programming algorithms, such as dynamic time warping, because they require no
supervision, but they are limited in performance and efficiency. As an
alternative, acoustic word embeddings -- fixed-dimensional vector
representations of variable-length spoken word segments -- have begun to be
considered for such tasks as well. However, the current space of such
discriminative embedding models, training approaches, and their application to
real-world downstream tasks is limited. We start by considering ``single-view"
training losses where the goal is to learn an acoustic word embedding model
that separates same-word and different-word spoken segment pairs. Then, we
consider ``multi-view" contrastive losses. In this setting, acoustic word
embeddings are learned jointly with embeddings of character sequences to
generate acoustically grounded embeddings of written words, or acoustically
grounded word embeddings.
In this thesis, we contribute new discriminative acoustic word embedding
(AWE) and acoustically grounded word embedding (AGWE) approaches based on
recurrent neural networks (RNNs). We improve model training in terms of both
efficiency and performance. We take these developments beyond English to
several low-resource languages and show that multilingual training improves
performance when labeled data is limited. We apply our embedding models, both
monolingual and multilingual, to the downstream tasks of query-by-example
speech search and automatic speech recognition. Finally, we show how our
embedding approaches compare with and complement more recent self-supervised
speech models.Comment: PhD thesi
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