Dysarthric Speech Recognition and Offline Handwriting Recognition using Deep Neural Networks

Millions of people around the world are diagnosed with neurological disorders like Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Due to the neurological damage as the disease progresses, the person suffering from the disease loses control of muscles, along with speech deterioration. Speech deterioration is due to neuro motor condition that limits manipulation of the articulators of the vocal tract, the condition collectively called as dysarthria. Even though dysarthric speech is grammatically and syntactically correct, it is difficult for humans to understand and for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems to decipher. With the emergence of deep learning, speech recognition systems have improved a lot compared to traditional speech recognition systems, which use sophisticated preprocessing techniques to extract speech features. In this digital era there are still many documents that are handwritten many of which need to be digitized. Offline handwriting recognition involves recognizing handwritten characters from images of handwritten text (i.e. scanned documents). This is an interesting task as it involves sequence learning with computer vision. The task is more difficult than Optical Character Recognition (OCR), because handwritten letters can be written in virtually infinite different styles. This thesis proposes exploiting deep learning techniques like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) for offline handwriting recognition. For speech recognition, we compare traditional methods for speech recognition with recent deep learning methods. Also, we apply speaker adaptation methods both at feature level and at parameter level to improve recognition of dysarthric speech

Learning Transferable Knowledge Through Embedding Spaces

The unprecedented processing demand, posed by the explosion of big data, challenges researchers to design efficient and adaptive machine learning algorithms that do not require persistent retraining and avoid learning redundant information. Inspired from learning techniques of intelligent biological agents, identifying transferable knowledge across learning problems has been a significant research focus to improve machine learning algorithms. In this thesis, we address the challenges of knowledge transfer through embedding spaces that capture and store hierarchical knowledge. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on the problem of cross-domain knowledge transfer. We first address zero-shot image classification, where the goal is to identify images from unseen classes using semantic descriptions of these classes. We train two coupled dictionaries which align visual and semantic domains via an intermediate embedding space. We then extend this idea by training deep networks that match data distributions of two visual domains in a shared cross-domain embedding space. Our approach addresses both semi-supervised and unsupervised domain adaptation settings. In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the problem of cross-task knowledge transfer. Here, the goal is to identify relations and similarities of multiple machine learning tasks to improve performance across the tasks. We first address the problem of zero-shot learning in a lifelong machine learning setting, where the goal is to learn tasks with no data using high-level task descriptions. Our idea is to relate high-level task descriptors to the optimal task parameters through an embedding space. We then develop a method to overcome the problem of catastrophic forgetting within continual learning setting of deep neural networks by enforcing the tasks to share the same distribution in the embedding space. We further demonstrate that our model can address the challenges of domain adaptation in the continual learning setting. Finally, we consider the problem of cross-agent knowledge transfer in the third part of the thesis. We demonstrate that multiple lifelong machine learning agents can collaborate to increase individual performance by sharing learned knowledge in an embedding space without sharing private data through a shared embedding space. We demonstrate that despite major differences, problems within the above learning scenarios can be tackled through learning an intermediate embedding space that allows transferring knowledge effectively

A survey on modern trainable activation functions

In neural networks literature, there is a strong interest in identifying and defining activation functions which can improve neural network performance. In recent years there has been a renovated interest of the scientific community in investigating activation functions which can be trained during the learning process, usually referred to as "trainable", "learnable" or "adaptable" activation functions. They appear to lead to better network performance. Diverse and heterogeneous models of trainable activation function have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we present a survey of these models. Starting from a discussion on the use of the term "activation function" in literature, we propose a taxonomy of trainable activation functions, highlight common and distinctive proprieties of recent and past models, and discuss main advantages and limitations of this type of approach. We show that many of the proposed approaches are equivalent to adding neuron layers which use fixed (non-trainable) activation functions and some simple local rule that constraints the corresponding weight layers.Comment: Published in "Neural Networks" journal (Elsevier

Basque-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-Basque machine translation for the health domain

[EU]Master Amaierako Lan honek medikuntza domeinuko euskara eta gaztelera arteko itzulpen automatiko sistema bat garatzeko helburuarekin emandako lehenengo urratsak aurkezten ditu. Corpus elebidun nahikoaren faltan, hainbat esperimentu burutu dira Itzulpen Automatiko Neuronalean erabiltzen diren parametroak domeinuz kanpoko corpusean aztertzeko; medikuntza domeinuan izandako jokaera ebaluatzeko ordea, eskuz itzulitako corpusa erabili da medikuntza domeinuko corpusen presentzia handituz entrenatutako sistema desberdinak probatzeko. Lortutako emaitzek deskribatutako helbururako bidean lehenengo aurrerapausoa suposatzen dute.[EN]This project presents the initial steps towards the objective of developing a Machine Translation system for the health domain between Basque and Spanish. In the absence of a big enough bilingual corpus, several experiments have been carried out to test different Neural Machine Translation parameters on an out-of-domain corpus; while performance on the health domain has been evaluated with a manually translated corpus in different systems trained with increasing presence of health domain corpora. The results obtained represent a first step forward to the described objective

Adaptation Algorithms for Neural Network-Based Speech Recognition: An Overview

We present a structured overview of adaptation algorithms for neural network-based speech recognition, considering both hybrid hidden Markov model / neural network systems and end-to-end neural network systems, with a focus on speaker adaptation, domain adaptation, and accent adaptation. The overview characterizes adaptation algorithms as based on embeddings, model parameter adaptation, or data augmentation. We present a meta-analysis of the performance of speech recognition adaptation algorithms, based on relative error rate reductions as reported in the literature.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing. 30 pages, 27 figure

Optimisation Method for Training Deep Neural Networks in Classification of Non- functional Requirements

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are regarded critical to a software system's success. The majority of NFR detection and classification solutions have relied on supervised machine learning models. It is hindered by the lack of labelled data for training and necessitate a significant amount of time spent on feature engineering. In this work we explore emerging deep learning techniques to reduce the burden of feature engineering. The goal of this study is to develop an autonomous system that can classify NFRs into multiple classes based on a labelled corpus. In the first section of the thesis, we standardise the NFRs ontology and annotations to produce a corpus based on five attributes: usability, reliability, efficiency, maintainability, and portability. In the second section, the design and implementation of four neural networks, including the artificial neural network, convolutional neural network, long short-term memory, and gated recurrent unit are examined to classify NFRs. These models, necessitate a large corpus. To overcome this limitation, we proposed a new paradigm for data augmentation. This method uses a sort and concatenates strategy to combine two phrases from the same class, resulting in a two-fold increase in data size while keeping the domain vocabulary intact. We compared our method to a baseline (no augmentation) and an existing approach Easy data augmentation (EDA) with pre-trained word embeddings. All training has been performed under two modifications to the data; augmentation on the entire data before train/validation split vs augmentation on train set only. Our findings show that as compared to EDA and baseline, NFRs classification model improved greatly, and CNN outperformed when trained using our suggested technique in the first setting. However, we saw a slight boost in the second experimental setup with just train set augmentation. As a result, we can determine that augmentation of the validation is required in order to achieve acceptable results with our proposed approach. We hope that our ideas will inspire new data augmentation techniques, whether they are generic or task specific. Furthermore, it would also be useful to implement this strategy in other languages

Sim2real transfer learning for 3D human pose estimation: motion to the rescue

Synthetic visual data can provide practically infinite diversity and rich labels, while avoiding ethical issues with privacy and bias. However, for many tasks, current models trained on synthetic data generalize poorly to real data. The task of 3D human pose estimation is a particularly interesting example of this sim2real problem, because learning-based approaches perform reasonably well given real training data, yet labeled 3D poses are extremely difficult to obtain in the wild, limiting scalability. In this paper, we show that standard neural-network approaches, which perform poorly when trained on synthetic RGB images, can perform well when the data is pre-processed to extract cues about the person's motion, notably as optical flow and the motion of 2D keypoints. Therefore, our results suggest that motion can be a simple way to bridge a sim2real gap when video is available. We evaluate on the 3D Poses in the Wild dataset, the most challenging modern benchmark for 3D pose estimation, where we show full 3D mesh recovery that is on par with state-of-the-art methods trained on real 3D sequences, despite training only on synthetic humans from the SURREAL dataset.Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 201