257 research outputs found
A Very Low Resource Language Speech Corpus for Computational Language Documentation Experiments
Most speech and language technologies are trained with massive amounts of
speech and text information. However, most of the world languages do not have
such resources or stable orthography. Systems constructed under these almost
zero resource conditions are not only promising for speech technology but also
for computational language documentation. The goal of computational language
documentation is to help field linguists to (semi-)automatically analyze and
annotate audio recordings of endangered and unwritten languages. Example tasks
are automatic phoneme discovery or lexicon discovery from the speech signal.
This paper presents a speech corpus collected during a realistic language
documentation process. It is made up of 5k speech utterances in Mboshi (Bantu
C25) aligned to French text translations. Speech transcriptions are also made
available: they correspond to a non-standard graphemic form close to the
language phonology. We present how the data was collected, cleaned and
processed and we illustrate its use through a zero-resource task: spoken term
discovery. The dataset is made available to the community for reproducible
computational language documentation experiments and their evaluation.Comment: accepted to LREC 201
Towards trustworthy phoneme boundary detection with autoregressive model and improved evaluation metric
Phoneme boundary detection has been studied due to its central role in
various speech applications. In this work, we point out that this task needs to
be addressed not only by algorithmic way, but also by evaluation metric. To
this end, we first propose a state-of-the-art phoneme boundary detector that
operates in an autoregressive manner, dubbed SuperSeg. Experiments on the TIMIT
and Buckeye corpora demonstrates that SuperSeg identifies phoneme boundaries
with significant margin compared to existing models. Furthermore, we note that
there is a limitation on the popular evaluation metric, R-value, and propose
new evaluation metrics that prevent each boundary from contributing to
evaluation multiple times. The proposed metrics reveal the weaknesses of
non-autoregressive baselines and establishes a reliable criterion that suits
for evaluating phoneme boundary detection.Comment: 5 pages, submitted to ICASSP 202
Deep Learning for Audio Signal Processing
Given the recent surge in developments of deep learning, this article
provides a review of the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for audio
signal processing. Speech, music, and environmental sound processing are
considered side-by-side, in order to point out similarities and differences
between the domains, highlighting general methods, problems, key references,
and potential for cross-fertilization between areas. The dominant feature
representations (in particular, log-mel spectra and raw waveform) and deep
learning models are reviewed, including convolutional neural networks, variants
of the long short-term memory architecture, as well as more audio-specific
neural network models. Subsequently, prominent deep learning application areas
are covered, i.e. audio recognition (automatic speech recognition, music
information retrieval, environmental sound detection, localization and
tracking) and synthesis and transformation (source separation, audio
enhancement, generative models for speech, sound, and music synthesis).
Finally, key issues and future questions regarding deep learning applied to
audio signal processing are identified.Comment: 15 pages, 2 pdf figure
Multi-Task Learning of Keyphrase Boundary Classification
Keyphrase boundary classification (KBC) is the task of detecting keyphrases
in scientific articles and labelling them with respect to predefined types.
Although important in practice, this task is so far underexplored, partly due
to the lack of labelled data. To overcome this, we explore several auxiliary
tasks, including semantic super-sense tagging and identification of multi-word
expressions, and cast the task as a multi-task learning problem with deep
recurrent neural networks. Our multi-task models perform significantly better
than previous state of the art approaches on two scientific KBC datasets,
particularly for long keyphrases.Comment: ACL 201
Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Phoneme Segmentation
We propose a self-supervised representation learning model for the task of
unsupervised phoneme boundary detection. The model is a convolutional neural
network that operates directly on the raw waveform. It is optimized to identify
spectral changes in the signal using the Noise-Contrastive Estimation
principle. At test time, a peak detection algorithm is applied over the model
outputs to produce the final boundaries. As such, the proposed model is trained
in a fully unsupervised manner with no manual annotations in the form of target
boundaries nor phonetic transcriptions. We compare the proposed approach to
several unsupervised baselines using both TIMIT and Buckeye corpora. Results
suggest that our approach surpasses the baseline models and reaches
state-of-the-art performance on both data sets. Furthermore, we experimented
with expanding the training set with additional examples from the Librispeech
corpus. We evaluated the resulting model on distributions and languages that
were not seen during the training phase (English, Hebrew and German) and showed
that utilizing additional untranscribed data is beneficial for model
performance.Comment: Interspeech 2020 pape
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