7,244 research outputs found
Nonparametric Bayesian Double Articulation Analyzer for Direct Language Acquisition from Continuous Speech Signals
Human infants can discover words directly from unsegmented speech signals
without any explicitly labeled data. In this paper, we develop a novel machine
learning method called nonparametric Bayesian double articulation analyzer
(NPB-DAA) that can directly acquire language and acoustic models from observed
continuous speech signals. For this purpose, we propose an integrative
generative model that combines a language model and an acoustic model into a
single generative model called the "hierarchical Dirichlet process hidden
language model" (HDP-HLM). The HDP-HLM is obtained by extending the
hierarchical Dirichlet process hidden semi-Markov model (HDP-HSMM) proposed by
Johnson et al. An inference procedure for the HDP-HLM is derived using the
blocked Gibbs sampler originally proposed for the HDP-HSMM. This procedure
enables the simultaneous and direct inference of language and acoustic models
from continuous speech signals. Based on the HDP-HLM and its inference
procedure, we developed a novel double articulation analyzer. By assuming
HDP-HLM as a generative model of observed time series data, and by inferring
latent variables of the model, the method can analyze latent double
articulation structure, i.e., hierarchically organized latent words and
phonemes, of the data in an unsupervised manner. The novel unsupervised double
articulation analyzer is called NPB-DAA.
The NPB-DAA can automatically estimate double articulation structure embedded
in speech signals. We also carried out two evaluation experiments using
synthetic data and actual human continuous speech signals representing Japanese
vowel sequences. In the word acquisition and phoneme categorization tasks, the
NPB-DAA outperformed a conventional double articulation analyzer (DAA) and
baseline automatic speech recognition system whose acoustic model was trained
in a supervised manner.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, Draft submitted to IEEE Transactions on
Autonomous Mental Development (TAMD
Neural Discrete Representation Learning
Learning useful representations without supervision remains a key challenge
in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful generative
model that learns such discrete representations. Our model, the Vector
Quantised-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE), differs from VAEs in two key ways:
the encoder network outputs discrete, rather than continuous, codes; and the
prior is learnt rather than static. In order to learn a discrete latent
representation, we incorporate ideas from vector quantisation (VQ). Using the
VQ method allows the model to circumvent issues of "posterior collapse" --
where the latents are ignored when they are paired with a powerful
autoregressive decoder -- typically observed in the VAE framework. Pairing
these representations with an autoregressive prior, the model can generate high
quality images, videos, and speech as well as doing high quality speaker
conversion and unsupervised learning of phonemes, providing further evidence of
the utility of the learnt representations
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