Learning Latent Representations for Speech Generation and Transformation

An ability to model a generative process and learn a latent representation for speech in an unsupervised fashion will be crucial to process vast quantities of unlabelled speech data. Recently, deep probabilistic generative models such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have achieved tremendous success in modeling natural images. In this paper, we apply a convolutional VAE to model the generative process of natural speech. We derive latent space arithmetic operations to disentangle learned latent representations. We demonstrate the capability of our model to modify the phonetic content or the speaker identity for speech segments using the derived operations, without the need for parallel supervisory data.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 201

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