Implicitly Supervised Language Model Adaptation for Meeting Transcription

We describe the use of meeting metadata, acquired using a computerized meeting organization and note-taking system, to improve automatic transcription of meetings. By applying a two-step language model adaptation process based on notes and agenda items, we were able to reduce perplexity by 9 % and word error rate by 4 % relative on a set of ten meetings recorded in-house. This approach can be used to leverage other types of metadata.

Acoustic Adaptation to Dynamic Background Conditions with Asynchronous Transformations

This paper proposes a framework for performing adaptation to complex and non-stationary background conditions in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) by means of asynchronous Constrained Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (aCMLLR) transforms and asynchronous Noise Adaptive Training (aNAT). The proposed method aims to apply the feature transform that best compensates the background for every input frame. The implementation is done with a new Hidden Markov Model (HMM) topology that expands the usual left-to-right HMM into parallel branches adapted to different background conditions and permits transitions among them. Using this, the proposed adaptation does not require ground truth or previous knowledge about the background in each frame as it aims to maximise the overall log-likelihood of the decoded utterance. The proposed aCMLLR transforms can be further improved by retraining models in an aNAT fashion and by using speaker-based MLLR transforms in cascade for an efficient modelling of background effects and speaker. An initial evaluation in a modified version of the WSJCAM0 corpus incorporating 7 different background conditions provides a benchmark in which to evaluate the use of aCMLLR transforms. A relative reduction of 40.5% in Word Error Rate (WER) was achieved by the combined use of aCMLLR and MLLR in cascade. Finally, this selection of techniques was applied in the transcription of multi-genre media broadcasts, where the use of aNAT training, aCMLLR transforms and MLLR transforms provided a relative improvement of 2–3%

Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

Transfer Learning for Speech and Language Processing

Transfer learning is a vital technique that generalizes models trained for one setting or task to other settings or tasks. For example in speech recognition, an acoustic model trained for one language can be used to recognize speech in another language, with little or no re-training data. Transfer learning is closely related to multi-task learning (cross-lingual vs. multilingual), and is traditionally studied in the name of `model adaptation'. Recent advance in deep learning shows that transfer learning becomes much easier and more effective with high-level abstract features learned by deep models, and the `transfer' can be conducted not only between data distributions and data types, but also between model structures (e.g., shallow nets and deep nets) or even model types (e.g., Bayesian models and neural models). This review paper summarizes some recent prominent research towards this direction, particularly for speech and language processing. We also report some results from our group and highlight the potential of this very interesting research field.Comment: 13 pages, APSIPA 201

The CHiME-7 DASR Challenge: Distant Meeting Transcription with Multiple Devices in Diverse Scenarios

The CHiME challenges have played a significant role in the development and evaluation of robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. We introduce the CHiME-7 distant ASR (DASR) task, within the 7th CHiME challenge. This task comprises joint ASR and diarization in far-field settings with multiple, and possibly heterogeneous, recording devices. Different from previous challenges, we evaluate systems on 3 diverse scenarios: CHiME-6, DiPCo, and Mixer 6. The goal is for participants to devise a single system that can generalize across different array geometries and use cases with no a-priori information. Another departure from earlier CHiME iterations is that participants are allowed to use open-source pre-trained models and datasets. In this paper, we describe the challenge design, motivation, and fundamental research questions in detail. We also present the baseline system, which is fully array-topology agnostic and features multi-channel diarization, channel selection, guided source separation and a robust ASR model that leverages self-supervised speech representations (SSLR)

Analysis of Unsupervised and Noise-Robust Speaker-Adaptive HMM-Based Speech Synthesis Systems toward a Unified ASR and TTS Framework

For the 2009 Blizzard Challenge we have built an unsupervised version of the HTS-2008 speaker-adaptive HMM-based speech synthesis system for English, and a noise robust version of the systems for Mandarin. They are designed from a multidisciplinary application point of view in that we attempt to integrate the components of the TTS system with other technologies such as ASR. All the average voice models are trained exclusively from recognized, publicly available, ASR databases. Multi-pass LVCSR and confidence scores calculated from confusion network are used for the unsupervised systems, and noisy data recorded in cars or public spaces is used for the noise robust system. We believe the developed systems form solid benchmarks and provide good connections to ASR fields. This paper describes the development of the systems and reports the results and analysis of their evaluation