Annotation Graphs and Servers and Multi-Modal Resources: Infrastructure for Interdisciplinary Education, Research and Development

Annotation graphs and annotation servers offer infrastructure to support the analysis of human language resources in the form of time-series data such as text, audio and video. This paper outlines areas of common need among empirical linguists and computational linguists. After reviewing examples of data and tools used or under development for each of several areas, it proposes a common framework for future tool development, data annotation and resource sharing based upon annotation graphs and servers.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

A summary of the 2012 JHU CLSP Workshop on Zero Resource Speech Technologies and Models of Early Language Acquisition

We summarize the accomplishments of a multi-disciplinary workshop exploring the computational and scientific issues surrounding zero resource (unsupervised) speech technologies and related models of early language acquisition. Centered around the tasks of phonetic and lexical discovery, we consider unified evaluation metrics, present two new approaches for improving speaker independence in the absence of supervision, and evaluate the application of Bayesian word segmentation algorithms to automatic subword unit tokenizations. Finally, we present two strategies for integrating zero resource techniques into supervised settings, demonstrating the potential of unsupervised methods to improve mainstream technologies.5 page(s

Topic Identification for Speech without ASR

Modern topic identification (topic ID) systems for speech use automatic speech recognition (ASR) to produce speech transcripts, and perform supervised classification on such ASR outputs. However, under resource-limited conditions, the manually transcribed speech required to develop standard ASR systems can be severely limited or unavailable. In this paper, we investigate alternative unsupervised solutions to obtaining tokenizations of speech in terms of a vocabulary of automatically discovered word-like or phoneme-like units, without depending on the supervised training of ASR systems. Moreover, using automatic phoneme-like tokenizations, we demonstrate that a convolutional neural network based framework for learning spoken document representations provides competitive performance compared to a standard bag-of-words representation, as evidenced by comprehensive topic ID evaluations on both single-label and multi-label classification tasks.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; accepted for publication at Interspeech 201

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

Direct Acoustics-to-Word Models for English Conversational Speech Recognition

Recent work on end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) has shown that the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss can be used to convert acoustics to phone or character sequences. Such systems are used with a dictionary and separately-trained Language Model (LM) to produce word sequences. However, they are not truly end-to-end in the sense of mapping acoustics directly to words without an intermediate phone representation. In this paper, we present the first results employing direct acoustics-to-word CTC models on two well-known public benchmark tasks: Switchboard and CallHome. These models do not require an LM or even a decoder at run-time and hence recognize speech with minimal complexity. However, due to the large number of word output units, CTC word models require orders of magnitude more data to train reliably compared to traditional systems. We present some techniques to mitigate this issue. Our CTC word model achieves a word error rate of 13.0%/18.8% on the Hub5-2000 Switchboard/CallHome test sets without any LM or decoder compared with 9.6%/16.0% for phone-based CTC with a 4-gram LM. We also present rescoring results on CTC word model lattices to quantify the performance benefits of a LM, and contrast the performance of word and phone CTC models.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech-201

The University of Alaska - Juneau Whalesong

UAJ student lobby committee takes action -- Alaska state vocational association conference held: Stell given leadership award Oremos named teacher of the year -- Preschool teacher certification endorsed -- Editorials -- Guest editorial by Greg Stevens: Draft counseling: accurate information on alternatives -- Close encounters with the Whalesong: Paquin is the UAJ voice heard up to 500 times daily -- Installation delayed -- Counselor's corner -- Through the porthole -- Sports & activities -- Third & fourth month entertainments -- Baleen cuisine -- UAJ teachers attend language festiva

Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question, Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody, and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of 35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Changes in copy editing (note title spelling changed