Comparative Study on Sentence Boundary Prediction for German and English Broadcast News

We present a comparative study on sentence boundary prediction for German and English broadcast news that explores generalization across different languages. In the feature extraction stage, word pause duration is firstly extracted from word aligned speech, and forward and backward language models are utilized to extract textual features. Then a gradient boosted machine is optimized by grid search to map these features to punctuation marks. Experimental results confirm that word pause duration is a simple yet effective feature to predict whether there is a sentence boundary after that word. We found that Bayes risk derived from pause duration distributions of sentence boundary words and non-boundary words is an effective measure to assess the inherent difficulty of sentence boundary prediction. The proposed method achieved F-measures of over 90% on reference text and around 90% on ASR transcript for both German broadcast news corpus and English multi-genre broadcast news corpus. This demonstrates the state of the art performance of the proposed method

Speech technologies for the audiovisual and multimedia interaction environments

361 p

Transfer learning: bridging the gap between deep learning and domain-specific text mining

Inspired by the success of deep learning techniques in Natural Language Processing (NLP), this dissertation tackles the domain-specific text mining problems for which the generic deep learning approaches would fail. More specifically, the domain-specific problems are: (1) success prediction in crowdfunding, (2) variants identification in biomedical literature, and (3) text data augmentation for domains with low-resources. In the first part, transfer learning in a multimodal perspective is utilized to facilitate solving the project success prediction on the crowdfunding application. Even though the information in a project profile can be of different modalities such as text, images, and metadata, most existing prediction approaches leverage only the text modality. It is promising to utilize the visual images in project profiles to find out how images could contribute to the success prediction. An advanced neural network scheme is designed and evaluated combining information learned from different modalities for project success prediction. In the second part, transfer learning is combined with deep learning techniques to solve genomic variants Named Entity Recognition (NER) problems in biomedical literature. Most of the advanced generic NER algorithms can fail due to the restricted training corpus. However, those generic deep learning algorithms are capable of learning from a canonical corpus, without any effort on feature engineering. This work aims to build an end-to-end deep learning approach to transfer the domain-specific knowledge to those advanced generic NER algorithms, addressing the challenges in low-resource training and requiring neither hand-crafted features nor post-processing rules. For the last part, transfer learning with knowledge distillation and active learning are utilized to solve text augmentation for domains with low-resources. Most of the recent text augmentation methods heavily rely on large external resources. This work is dedicates to solving the text augmentation problem adaptively and consistently with minimal resources for token-level tasks like NER. The solution can also assure the reliability of machine labels for noisy data and can enhance training consistency with noisy labels. All the works are evaluated on different domain-specific benchmarks, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of those proposed methods. The advantages also indicate promising potential for transfer learning in domain-specific applications

Multi-dialect Arabic broadcast speech recognition

Dialectal Arabic speech research suffers from the lack of labelled resources and standardised orthography. There are three main challenges in dialectal Arabic speech recognition: (i) finding labelled dialectal Arabic speech data, (ii) training robust dialectal speech recognition models from limited labelled data and (iii) evaluating speech recognition for dialects with no orthographic rules. This thesis is concerned with the following three contributions: Arabic Dialect Identification: We are mainly dealing with Arabic speech without prior knowledge of the spoken dialect. Arabic dialects could be sufficiently diverse to the extent that one can argue that they are different languages rather than dialects of the same language. We have two contributions: First, we use crowdsourcing to annotate a multi-dialectal speech corpus collected from Al Jazeera TV channel. We obtained utterance level dialect labels for 57 hours of high-quality consisting of four major varieties of dialectal Arabic (DA), comprised of Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf or Arabic peninsula, North African or Moroccan from almost 1,000 hours. Second, we build an Arabic dialect identification (ADI) system. We explored two main groups of features, namely acoustic features and linguistic features. For the linguistic features, we look at a wide range of features, addressing words, characters and phonemes. With respect to acoustic features, we look at raw features such as mel-frequency cepstral coefficients combined with shifted delta cepstra (MFCC-SDC), bottleneck features and the i-vector as a latent variable. We studied both generative and discriminative classifiers, in addition to deep learning approaches, namely deep neural network (DNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN). In our work, we propose Arabic as a five class dialect challenge comprising of the previously mentioned four dialects as well as modern standard Arabic. Arabic Speech Recognition: We introduce our effort in building Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) and we create an open research community to advance it. This section has two main goals: First, creating a framework for Arabic ASR that is publicly available for research. We address our effort in building two multi-genre broadcast (MGB) challenges. MGB-2 focuses on broadcast news using more than 1,200 hours of speech and 130M words of text collected from the broadcast domain. MGB-3, however, focuses on dialectal multi-genre data with limited non-orthographic speech collected from YouTube, with special attention paid to transfer learning. Second, building a robust Arabic ASR system and reporting a competitive word error rate (WER) to use it as a potential benchmark to advance the state of the art in Arabic ASR. Our overall system is a combination of five acoustic models (AM): unidirectional long short term memory (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM (BLSTM), time delay neural network (TDNN), TDNN layers along with LSTM layers (TDNN-LSTM) and finally TDNN layers followed by BLSTM layers (TDNN-BLSTM). The AM is trained using purely sequence trained neural networks lattice-free maximum mutual information (LFMMI). The generated lattices are rescored using a four-gram language model (LM) and a recurrent neural network with maximum entropy (RNNME) LM. Our official WER is 13%, which has the lowest WER reported on this task. Evaluation: The third part of the thesis addresses our effort in evaluating dialectal speech with no orthographic rules. Our methods learn from multiple transcribers and align the speech hypothesis to overcome the non-orthographic aspects. Our multi-reference WER (MR-WER) approach is similar to the BLEU score used in machine translation (MT). We have also automated this process by learning different spelling variants from Twitter data. We mine automatically from a huge collection of tweets in an unsupervised fashion to build more than 11M n-to-m lexical pairs, and we propose a new evaluation metric: dialectal WER (WERd). Finally, we tried to estimate the word error rate (e-WER) with no reference transcription using decoding and language features. We show that our word error rate estimation is robust for many scenarios with and without the decoding features

Deep neural network acoustic models for multi-dialect Arabic speech recognition

Speech is a desirable communication method between humans and computers. The major concerns of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) are determining a set of classification features and finding a suitable recognition model for these features. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have been demonstrated to be powerful models for representing time varying signals. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have also been widely used for representing time varying quasi-stationary signals. Arabic is one of the oldest living languages and one of the oldest Semitic languages in the world, it is also the fifth most generally used language and is the mother tongue for roughly 200 million people. Arabic speech recognition has been a fertile area of reasearch over the previous two decades, as attested by the various papers that have been published on this subject. This thesis investigates phoneme and acoustic models based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) and Deep Echo State Networks for multi-dialect Arabic Speech Recognition. Moreover, the TIMIT corpus with a wide variety of American dialects is also aimed to evaluate the proposed models. The availability of speech data that is time-aligned and labelled at phonemic level is a fundamental requirement for building speech recognition systems. A developed Arabic phoneme database (APD) was manually timed and phonetically labelled. This dataset was constructed from the King Abdul-Aziz Arabic Phonetics Database (KAPD) database for Saudi Arabia dialect and the Centre for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU2002) database for different Arabic dialects. This dataset covers 8148 Arabic phonemes. In addition, a corpus of 120 speakers (13 hours of Arabic speech) randomly selected from the Levantine Arabic dialect database that is used for training and 24 speakers (2.4 hours) for testing are revised and transcription errors were manually corrected. The selected dataset is labelled automatically using the HTK Hidden Markov Model toolkit. TIMIT corpus is also used for phone recognition and acoustic modelling task. We used 462 speakers (3.14 hours) for training and 24 speakers (0.81 hours) for testing. For Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), a Deep Neural Network (DNN) is used to evaluate its adoption in developing a framewise phoneme recognition and an acoustic modelling system for Arabic speech recognition. Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) DNN models have not been explored for any Arabic corpora previously. This allows us to claim priority for adopting this RBM DNN model for the Levantine Arabic acoustic models. A post-processing enhancement was also applied to the DNN acoustic model outputs in order to improve the recognition accuracy and to obtain the accuracy at a phoneme level instead of the frame level. This post process has significantly improved the recognition performance. An Echo State Network (ESN) is developed and evaluated for Arabic phoneme recognition with different learning algorithms. This investigated the use of the conventional ESN trained with supervised and forced learning algorithms. A novel combined supervised/forced supervised learning algorithm (unsupervised adaptation) was developed and tested on the proposed optimised Arabic phoneme recognition datasets. This new model is evaluated on the Levantine dataset and empirically compared with the results obtained from the baseline Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). A significant improvement on the recognition performance was achieved when the ESN model was implemented compared to the baseline RBM DNN model’s result. The results show that the ESN model has a better ability for recognizing phonemes sequences than the DNN model for a small vocabulary size dataset. The adoption of the ESNs model for acoustic modeling is seen to be more valid than the adoption of the DNNs model for acoustic modeling speech recognition, as ESNs are recurrent models and expected to support sequence models better than the RBM DNN models even with the contextual input window. The TIMIT corpus is also used to investigate deep learning for framewise phoneme classification and acoustic modelling using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and Echo State Networks (ESNs) to allow us to make a direct and valid comparison between the proposed systems investigated in this thesis and the published works in equivalent projects based on framewise phoneme recognition used the TIMIT corpus. Our main finding on this corpus is that ESN network outperform time-windowed RBM DNN ones. However, our developed system ESN-based shows 10% lower performance when it was compared to the other systems recently reported in the literature that used the same corpus. This due to the hardware availability and not applying speaker and noise adaption that can improve the results in this thesis as our aim is to investigate the proposed models for speech recognition and to make a direct comparison between these models

IberSPEECH 2020: XI Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla and VII Iberian SLTech

IberSPEECH2020 is a two-day event, bringing together the best researchers and practitioners in speech and language technologies in Iberian languages to promote interaction and discussion. The organizing committee has planned a wide variety of scientific and social activities, including technical paper presentations, keynote lectures, presentation of projects, laboratories activities, recent PhD thesis, discussion panels, a round table, and awards to the best thesis and papers. The program of IberSPEECH2020 includes a total of 32 contributions that will be presented distributed among 5 oral sessions, a PhD session, and a projects session. To ensure the quality of all the contributions, each submitted paper was reviewed by three members of the scientific review committee. All the papers in the conference will be accessible through the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Online Archive. Paper selection was based on the scores and comments provided by the scientific review committee, which includes 73 researchers from different institutions (mainly from Spain and Portugal, but also from France, Germany, Brazil, Iran, Greece, Hungary, Czech Republic, Ucrania, Slovenia). Furthermore, it is confirmed to publish an extension of selected papers as a special issue of the Journal of Applied Sciences, “IberSPEECH 2020: Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages”, published by MDPI with fully open access. In addition to regular paper sessions, the IberSPEECH2020 scientific program features the following activities: the ALBAYZIN evaluation challenge session.Red Española de Tecnologías del Habla. Universidad de Valladoli

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Conversational Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition

Colloquial Arabic (CA) is the set of spoken variants of modern Arabic that exist in the form of regional dialects and are considered generally to be mother-tongues in those regions. CA has limited textual resource because it exists only as a spoken language and without a standardised written form. Normally the modern standard Arabic (MSA) writing convention is employed that has limitations in phonetically representing CA. Without phonetic dictionaries the pronunciation of CA words is ambiguous, and can only be obtained through word and/or sentence context. Moreover, CA inherits the MSA complex word structure where words can be created from attaching affixes to a word. In automatic speech recognition (ASR), commonly used approaches to model acoustic, pronunciation and word variability are language independent. However, one can observe significant differences in performance between English and CA, with the latter yielding up to three times higher error rates. This thesis investigates the main issues for the under-performance of CA ASR systems. The work focuses on two directions: first, the impact of limited lexical coverage, and insufficient training data for written CA on language modelling is investigated; second, obtaining better models for the acoustics and pronunciations by learning to transfer between written and spoken forms. Several original contributions result from each direction. Using data-driven classes from decomposed text are shown to reduce out-of-vocabulary rate. A novel colloquialisation system to import additional data is introduced; automatic diacritisation to restore the missing short vowels was found to yield good performance; and a new acoustic set for describing CA was defined. Using the proposed methods improved the ASR performance in terms of word error rate in a CA conversational telephone speech ASR task

Data Mining

The availability of big data due to computerization and automation has generated an urgent need for new techniques to analyze and convert big data into useful information and knowledge. Data mining is a promising and leading-edge technology for mining large volumes of data, looking for hidden information, and aiding knowledge discovery. It can be used for characterization, classification, discrimination, anomaly detection, association, clustering, trend or evolution prediction, and much more in fields such as science, medicine, economics, engineering, computers, and even business analytics. This book presents basic concepts, ideas, and research in data mining