764 research outputs found
Automated speech and audio analysis for semantic access to multimedia
The deployment and integration of audio processing tools can enhance the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and as a consequence, improve the effectiveness of conceptual access tools. This paper overviews the various ways in which automatic speech and audio analysis can contribute to increased granularity of automatically extracted metadata. A number of techniques will be presented, including the alignment of speech and text resources, large vocabulary speech recognition, key word spotting and speaker classification. The applicability of techniques will be discussed from a media crossing perspective. The added value of the techniques and their potential contribution to the content value chain will be illustrated by the description of two (complementary) demonstrators for browsing broadcast news archives
Acoustic data-driven lexicon learning based on a greedy pronunciation selection framework
Speech recognition systems for irregularly-spelled languages like English
normally require hand-written pronunciations. In this paper, we describe a
system for automatically obtaining pronunciations of words for which
pronunciations are not available, but for which transcribed data exists. Our
method integrates information from the letter sequence and from the acoustic
evidence. The novel aspect of the problem that we address is the problem of how
to prune entries from such a lexicon (since, empirically, lexicons with too
many entries do not tend to be good for ASR performance). Experiments on
various ASR tasks show that, with the proposed framework, starting with an
initial lexicon of several thousand words, we are able to learn a lexicon which
performs close to a full expert lexicon in terms of WER performance on test
data, and is better than lexicons built using G2P alone or with a pruning
criterion based on pronunciation probability
On Generating Combilex Pronunciations via Morphological Analysis
Combilex is a high-quality lexicon that has been developed specifically for speech technology purposes and recently released by CSTR. Combilex benefits from many advanced features. This paper explores one of these: the ability to generate fully-specified transcriptions for morphologically derived words automatically. This functionality was originally implemented to encode the pronunciations of derived words in terms of their constituent morphemes, thus accelerating lexicon development and ensuring a high level of consistency. In this paper, we propose this method of modelling pronunciations can be exploited further by combining it with a morphological parser, thus yielding a method to generate full transcriptions for unknown derived words. Not only could this accelerate adding new derived words to Combilex, but it could also serve as an alternative to conventional letter-to-sound rules. This paper presents preliminary work indicating this is a promising direction
Who Spoke What? A Latent Variable Framework for the Joint Decoding of Multiple Speakers and their Keywords
In this paper, we present a latent variable (LV) framework to identify all
the speakers and their keywords given a multi-speaker mixture signal. We
introduce two separate LVs to denote active speakers and the keywords uttered.
The dependency of a spoken keyword on the speaker is modeled through a
conditional probability mass function. The distribution of the mixture signal
is expressed in terms of the LV mass functions and speaker-specific-keyword
models. The proposed framework admits stochastic models, representing the
probability density function of the observation vectors given that a particular
speaker uttered a specific keyword, as speaker-specific-keyword models. The LV
mass functions are estimated in a Maximum Likelihood framework using the
Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The active speakers and their keywords
are detected as modes of the joint distribution of the two LVs. In mixture
signals, containing two speakers uttering the keywords simultaneously, the
proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 82% for detecting both the speakers
and their respective keywords, using Student's-t mixture models as
speaker-specific-keyword models.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures Submitted to : IEEE Signal Processing Letter
Compositional Morphology for Word Representations and Language Modelling
This paper presents a scalable method for integrating compositional
morphological representations into a vector-based probabilistic language model.
Our approach is evaluated in the context of log-bilinear language models,
rendered suitably efficient for implementation inside a machine translation
decoder by factoring the vocabulary. We perform both intrinsic and extrinsic
evaluations, presenting results on a range of languages which demonstrate that
our model learns morphological representations that both perform well on word
similarity tasks and lead to substantial reductions in perplexity. When used
for translation into morphologically rich languages with large vocabularies,
our models obtain improvements of up to 1.2 BLEU points relative to a baseline
system using back-off n-gram models.Comment: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning
(ICML
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