Very Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Robust Speech Recognition

This paper describes the extension and optimization of our previous work on very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for effective recognition of noisy speech in the Aurora 4 task. The appropriate number of convolutional layers, the sizes of the filters, pooling operations and input feature maps are all modified: the filter and pooling sizes are reduced and dimensions of input feature maps are extended to allow adding more convolutional layers. Furthermore appropriate input padding and input feature map selection strategies are developed. In addition, an adaptation framework using joint training of very deep CNN with auxiliary features i-vector and fMLLR features is developed. These modifications give substantial word error rate reductions over the standard CNN used as baseline. Finally the very deep CNN is combined with an LSTM-RNN acoustic model and it is shown that state-level weighted log likelihood score combination in a joint acoustic model decoding scheme is very effective. On the Aurora 4 task, the very deep CNN achieves a WER of 8.81%, further 7.99% with auxiliary feature joint training, and 7.09% with LSTM-RNN joint decoding.Comment: accepted by SLT 201

Environmental Sound Classification with Parallel Temporal-spectral Attention

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are one of the best-performing neural network architectures for environmental sound classification (ESC). Recently, temporal attention mechanisms have been used in CNN to capture the useful information from the relevant time frames for audio classification, especially for weakly labelled data where the onset and offset times of the sound events are not applied. In these methods, however, the inherent spectral characteristics and variations are not explicitly exploited when obtaining the deep features. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel temporal-spectral attention mechanism for CNN to learn discriminative sound representations, which enhances the temporal and spectral features by capturing the importance of different time frames and frequency bands. Parallel branches are constructed to allow temporal attention and spectral attention to be applied respectively in order to mitigate interference from the segments without the presence of sound events. The experiments on three environmental sound classification (ESC) datasets and two acoustic scene classification (ASC) datasets show that our method improves the classification performance and also exhibits robustness to noise.Comment: submitted to INTERSPEECH202