18,197 research outputs found
Phone-aware Neural Language Identification
Pure acoustic neural models, particularly the LSTM-RNN model, have shown
great potential in language identification (LID). However, the phonetic
information has been largely overlooked by most of existing neural LID models,
although this information has been used in the conventional phonetic LID
systems with a great success. We present a phone-aware neural LID architecture,
which is a deep LSTM-RNN LID system but accepts output from an RNN-based ASR
system. By utilizing the phonetic knowledge, the LID performance can be
significantly improved. Interestingly, even if the test language is not
involved in the ASR training, the phonetic knowledge still presents a large
contribution. Our experiments conducted on four languages within the Babel
corpus demonstrated that the phone-aware approach is highly effective.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1705.0315
Phonetic Temporal Neural Model for Language Identification
Deep neural models, particularly the LSTM-RNN model, have shown great
potential for language identification (LID). However, the use of phonetic
information has been largely overlooked by most existing neural LID methods,
although this information has been used very successfully in conventional
phonetic LID systems. We present a phonetic temporal neural model for LID,
which is an LSTM-RNN LID system that accepts phonetic features produced by a
phone-discriminative DNN as the input, rather than raw acoustic features. This
new model is similar to traditional phonetic LID methods, but the phonetic
knowledge here is much richer: it is at the frame level and involves compacted
information of all phones. Our experiments conducted on the Babel database and
the AP16-OLR database demonstrate that the temporal phonetic neural approach is
very effective, and significantly outperforms existing acoustic neural models.
It also outperforms the conventional i-vector approach on short utterances and
in noisy conditions.Comment: Submitted to TASL
Improving the translation environment for professional translators
When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side.
This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project
An Empirical Evaluation of Zero Resource Acoustic Unit Discovery
Acoustic unit discovery (AUD) is a process of automatically identifying a
categorical acoustic unit inventory from speech and producing corresponding
acoustic unit tokenizations. AUD provides an important avenue for unsupervised
acoustic model training in a zero resource setting where expert-provided
linguistic knowledge and transcribed speech are unavailable. Therefore, to
further facilitate zero-resource AUD process, in this paper, we demonstrate
acoustic feature representations can be significantly improved by (i)
performing linear discriminant analysis (LDA) in an unsupervised self-trained
fashion, and (ii) leveraging resources of other languages through building a
multilingual bottleneck (BN) feature extractor to give effective cross-lingual
generalization. Moreover, we perform comprehensive evaluations of AUD efficacy
on multiple downstream speech applications, and their correlated performance
suggests that AUD evaluations are feasible using different alternative language
resources when only a subset of these evaluation resources can be available in
typical zero resource applications.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure; Accepted for publication at ICASSP 201
Speaker segmentation and clustering
This survey focuses on two challenging speech processing topics, namely: speaker segmentation and speaker clustering. Speaker segmentation aims at finding speaker change points in an audio stream, whereas speaker clustering aims at grouping speech segments based on speaker characteristics. Model-based, metric-based, and hybrid speaker segmentation algorithms are reviewed. Concerning speaker clustering, deterministic and probabilistic algorithms are examined. A comparative assessment of the reviewed algorithms is undertaken, the algorithm advantages and disadvantages are indicated, insight to the algorithms is offered, and deductions as well as recommendations are given. Rich transcription and movie analysis are candidate applications that benefit from combined speaker segmentation and clustering. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Scalable ASL sign recognition using model-based machine learning and linguistically annotated corpora
We report on the high success rates of our new, scalable, computational approach for sign recognition from monocular video, exploiting linguistically annotated ASL datasets with multiple signers. We recognize signs using a hybrid framework combining state-of-the-art learning methods with features based on what is known about the linguistic composition of lexical signs. We model and recognize the sub-components of sign production, with attention to hand shape, orientation, location, motion trajectories, plus non-manual features, and we combine these within a CRF framework. The effect is to make the sign recognition problem robust, scalable, and feasible with relatively smaller datasets than are required for purely data-driven methods. From a 350-sign vocabulary of isolated, citation-form lexical signs from the American Sign Language Lexicon Video Dataset (ASLLVD), including both 1- and 2-handed signs, we achieve a top-1 accuracy of 93.3% and a top-5 accuracy of 97.9%. The high probability with which we can produce 5 sign candidates that contain the correct result opens the door to potential applications, as it is reasonable to provide a sign lookup functionality that offers the user 5 possible signs, in decreasing order of likelihood, with the user then asked to select the desired sign
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