679 research outputs found
Improving speaker turn embedding by crossmodal transfer learning from face embedding
Learning speaker turn embeddings has shown considerable improvement in
situations where conventional speaker modeling approaches fail. However, this
improvement is relatively limited when compared to the gain observed in face
embedding learning, which has been proven very successful for face verification
and clustering tasks. Assuming that face and voices from the same identities
share some latent properties (like age, gender, ethnicity), we propose three
transfer learning approaches to leverage the knowledge from the face domain
(learned from thousands of images and identities) for tasks in the speaker
domain. These approaches, namely target embedding transfer, relative distance
transfer, and clustering structure transfer, utilize the structure of the
source face embedding space at different granularities to regularize the target
speaker turn embedding space as optimizing terms. Our methods are evaluated on
two public broadcast corpora and yield promising advances over competitive
baselines in verification and audio clustering tasks, especially when dealing
with short speaker utterances. The analysis of the results also gives insight
into characteristics of the embedding spaces and shows their potential
applications
Dialogue history integration into end-to-end signal-to-concept spoken language understanding systems
This work investigates the embeddings for representing dialog history in
spoken language understanding (SLU) systems. We focus on the scenario when the
semantic information is extracted directly from the speech signal by means of a
single end-to-end neural network model. We proposed to integrate dialogue
history into an end-to-end signal-to-concept SLU system. The dialog history is
represented in the form of dialog history embedding vectors (so-called
h-vectors) and is provided as an additional information to end-to-end SLU
models in order to improve the system performance. Three following types of
h-vectors are proposed and experimentally evaluated in this paper: (1)
supervised-all embeddings predicting bag-of-concepts expected in the answer of
the user from the last dialog system response; (2) supervised-freq embeddings
focusing on predicting only a selected set of semantic concept (corresponding
to the most frequent errors in our experiments); and (3) unsupervised
embeddings. Experiments on the MEDIA corpus for the semantic slot filling task
demonstrate that the proposed h-vectors improve the model performance.Comment: Accepted for ICASSP 2020 (Submitted: October 21, 2019
ASR error management for improving spoken language understanding
This paper addresses the problem of automatic speech recognition (ASR) error
detection and their use for improving spoken language understanding (SLU)
systems. In this study, the SLU task consists in automatically extracting, from
ASR transcriptions , semantic concepts and concept/values pairs in a e.g
touristic information system. An approach is proposed for enriching the set of
semantic labels with error specific labels and by using a recently proposed
neural approach based on word embeddings to compute well calibrated ASR
confidence measures. Experimental results are reported showing that it is
possible to decrease significantly the Concept/Value Error Rate with a state of
the art system, outperforming previously published results performance on the
same experimental data. It also shown that combining an SLU approach based on
conditional random fields with a neural encoder/decoder attention based
architecture , it is possible to effectively identifying confidence islands and
uncertain semantic output segments useful for deciding appropriate error
handling actions by the dialogue manager strategy .Comment: Interspeech 2017, Aug 2017, Stockholm, Sweden. 201
Pattern Mining for Named Entity Recognition
Revised selected paper of the LTC'2011 conferenceInternational audienceMany evaluation campaigns have shown that knowledge-based and data-driven approaches remain equally competitive for Named Entity Recognition. Our research team has developed CasEN, a symbolic system based on finite state tranducers, which achieved promising results during the Ester2 French-speaking evaluation campaign. Despite these encouraging results, manually extending the coverage of such a hand-crafted system is a difficult task. In this paper, we present a novel approach based on pattern mining for NER and to supplement our system's knowledge base. The system, mXS, exhaustively searches for hierarchical sequential patterns, that aim at detecting Named Entity boundaries. We assess their efficiency by using such patterns in a standalone mode and in combination with our existing system
Pattern Mining for Named Entity Recognition
International audienceMany evaluation campaigns have shown that knowledge-based and data-driven approaches remain equally competitive for Named Entity Recognition. Our re-search team has developed CasEN, a symbolic system based on finite state tran-ducers, which achieved promising results during the Ester2 French-speaking eval-uation campaign. Despite these encouraging results, manually extending the cov-erage of such a hand-crafted system is a difficult task. In this paper, we present a novel approach based on pattern mining for NER and to supplement our sys-tem's knowledge base. The system, mXS, exhaustively searches for hierarchical sequential patterns, that aim at detecting Named Entity boundaries. We assess their efficiency by using such patterns in a standalone mode and in combination with our existing system
LeBenchmark: A Reproducible Framework for Assessing Self-Supervised Representation Learning from Speech
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) using huge unlabeled data has been
successfully explored for image and natural language processing. Recent works
also investigated SSL from speech. They were notably successful to improve
performance on downstream tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR).
While these works suggest it is possible to reduce dependence on labeled data
for building efficient speech systems, their evaluation was mostly made on ASR
and using multiple and heterogeneous experimental settings (most of them for
English). This questions the objective comparison of SSL approaches and the
evaluation of their impact on building speech systems. In this paper, we
propose LeBenchmark: a reproducible framework for assessing SSL from speech. It
not only includes ASR (high and low resource) tasks but also spoken language
understanding, speech translation and emotion recognition. We also focus on
speech technologies in a language different than English: French. SSL models of
different sizes are trained from carefully sourced and documented datasets.
Experiments show that SSL is beneficial for most but not all tasks which
confirms the need for exhaustive and reliable benchmarks to evaluate its real
impact. LeBenchmark is shared with the scientific community for reproducible
research in SSL from speech.Comment: Will be presented at Interspeech 202
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