17,874 research outputs found
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
Weakly-Supervised Alignment of Video With Text
Suppose that we are given a set of videos, along with natural language
descriptions in the form of multiple sentences (e.g., manual annotations, movie
scripts, sport summaries etc.), and that these sentences appear in the same
temporal order as their visual counterparts. We propose in this paper a method
for aligning the two modalities, i.e., automatically providing a time stamp for
every sentence. Given vectorial features for both video and text, we propose to
cast this task as a temporal assignment problem, with an implicit linear
mapping between the two feature modalities. We formulate this problem as an
integer quadratic program, and solve its continuous convex relaxation using an
efficient conditional gradient algorithm. Several rounding procedures are
proposed to construct the final integer solution. After demonstrating
significant improvements over the state of the art on the related task of
aligning video with symbolic labels [7], we evaluate our method on a
challenging dataset of videos with associated textual descriptions [36], using
both bag-of-words and continuous representations for text.Comment: ICCV 2015 - IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, Dec
2015, Santiago, Chil
Unsupervised feature learning with discriminative encoder
In recent years, deep discriminative models have achieved extraordinary
performance on supervised learning tasks, significantly outperforming their
generative counterparts. However, their success relies on the presence of a
large amount of labeled data. How can one use the same discriminative models
for learning useful features in the absence of labels? We address this question
in this paper, by jointly modeling the distribution of data and latent features
in a manner that explicitly assigns zero probability to unobserved data. Rather
than maximizing the marginal probability of observed data, we maximize the
joint probability of the data and the latent features using a two step EM-like
procedure. To prevent the model from overfitting to our initial selection of
latent features, we use adversarial regularization. Depending on the task, we
allow the latent features to be one-hot or real-valued vectors and define a
suitable prior on the features. For instance, one-hot features correspond to
class labels and are directly used for the unsupervised and semi-supervised
classification task, whereas real-valued feature vectors are fed as input to
simple classifiers for auxiliary supervised discrimination tasks. The proposed
model, which we dub discriminative encoder (or DisCoder), is flexible in the
type of latent features that it can capture. The proposed model achieves
state-of-the-art performance on several challenging tasks.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, International Conference on Data Mining, 201
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
DocTag2Vec: An Embedding Based Multi-label Learning Approach for Document Tagging
Tagging news articles or blog posts with relevant tags from a collection of
predefined ones is coined as document tagging in this work. Accurate tagging of
articles can benefit several downstream applications such as recommendation and
search. In this work, we propose a novel yet simple approach called DocTag2Vec
to accomplish this task. We substantially extend Word2Vec and Doc2Vec---two
popular models for learning distributed representation of words and documents.
In DocTag2Vec, we simultaneously learn the representation of words, documents,
and tags in a joint vector space during training, and employ the simple
-nearest neighbor search to predict tags for unseen documents. In contrast
to previous multi-label learning methods, DocTag2Vec directly deals with raw
text instead of provided feature vector, and in addition, enjoys advantages
like the learning of tag representation, and the ability of handling newly
created tags. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct
experiments on several datasets and show promising results against
state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 10 page
Robust Multilingual Part-of-Speech Tagging via Adversarial Training
Adversarial training (AT) is a powerful regularization method for neural
networks, aiming to achieve robustness to input perturbations. Yet, the
specific effects of the robustness obtained from AT are still unclear in the
context of natural language processing. In this paper, we propose and analyze a
neural POS tagging model that exploits AT. In our experiments on the Penn
Treebank WSJ corpus and the Universal Dependencies (UD) dataset (27 languages),
we find that AT not only improves the overall tagging accuracy, but also 1)
prevents over-fitting well in low resource languages and 2) boosts tagging
accuracy for rare / unseen words. We also demonstrate that 3) the improved
tagging performance by AT contributes to the downstream task of dependency
parsing, and that 4) AT helps the model to learn cleaner word representations.
5) The proposed AT model is generally effective in different sequence labeling
tasks. These positive results motivate further use of AT for natural language
tasks.Comment: NAACL 201
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