1,368 research outputs found
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
Spoken Arabic News Classification Based on Speech Features
One of the most important consequences of what is known as the "Internet era" is the widespread of varied electronic data. This deployment urgently requires an automated system to classify these data to facilitate search and access to the topic in question. This system is commonly used in written texts. Because of the huge increase of spoken files nowadays, there is an acute need for building an automatic system to classify spoken files based on topics. This system has been discussed in the previous researches applied to spoken English texts, but it rarely takes into consideration spoken Arabic texts because Arabic language is challenging and its dataset is rare and not suitable for topic classification. To deal with this challenge, a new dataset is established depending on converting the common written text (ALJ-NEWS) which is widely used in researches in classifying written texts. Then, keywords extraction method is implemented in order to extract the keywords representing each class depending on using DTW. Finally, topic identification, based on (MFCC, PLP-RASTA) as speech features and (DTW, HMM) as identifiers, is created using a technique that is different from the traditional way, using ASR to extract the transcriptions. Regarding the evaluation of the system, F1-measure, precision and recall are used as evaluation metrics. The proposed system shows positive results in the topic classification field. The F1-measure for topic identification system using DTW classifier records 90.26% and 91.36% using HMM classifier in the average. In addition, the system achieves 89.65% of keywords identification accuracy
Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey
Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their
environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important
to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system
and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development.
Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic
systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through
embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems.
Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can
smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an
understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The
embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a
symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of
research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive
approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is
socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical
interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and
developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research
topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a
double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their
embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual
information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech
signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future
directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic
Topic Identification For Spontaneous Speech: Enriching Audio Features With Embedded Linguistic Information
Traditional topic identification solutions from audio rely on an automatic
speech recognition system (ASR) to produce transcripts used as input to a
text-based model. These approaches work well in high-resource scenarios, where
there are sufficient data to train both components of the pipeline. However, in
low-resource situations, the ASR system, even if available, produces
low-quality transcripts, leading to a bad text-based classifier. Moreover,
spontaneous speech containing hesitations can further degrade the performance
of the ASR model. In this paper, we investigate alternatives to the standard
text-only solutions by comparing audio-only and hybrid techniques of jointly
utilising text and audio features. The models evaluated on spontaneous Finnish
speech demonstrate that purely audio-based solutions are a viable option when
ASR components are not available, while the hybrid multi-modal solutions
achieve the best results.Comment: Accepted to EUSIPCO 202
Low Resource Efficient Speech Retrieval
Speech retrieval refers to the task of retrieving the information, which is useful or relevant to a user query, from speech collection. This thesis aims to examine ways in which speech retrieval can be improved in terms of requiring low resources - without extensively annotated corpora on which automated processing systems are typically built - and achieving high computational efficiency.
This work is focused on two speech retrieval technologies, spoken keyword retrieval and spoken document classification. Firstly, keyword retrieval - also referred to as keyword search (KWS) or spoken term detection - is defined as the task of retrieving the occurrences of a keyword specified by the user in text form, from speech collections. We make advances in an open vocabulary KWS platform using context-dependent Point Process Model (PPM). We further accomplish a PPM-based lattice generation framework, which improves KWS performance and enables automatic speech recognition (ASR) decoding.
Secondly, the massive volumes of speech data motivate the effort to organize and search speech collections through spoken document classification. In classifying real-world unstructured speech into predefined classes, the wildly collected speech recordings can be extremely long, of varying length, and contain multiple class label shifts at variable locations in the audio. For this reason each spoken document is often first split into sequential segments, and then each segment is independently classified. We present a general purpose method for classifying spoken segments, using a cascade of language independent acoustic modeling, foreign-language to English translation lexicons, and English-language classification. Next, instead of classifying each segment independently, we demonstrate that exploring the contextual dependencies across sequential segments can provide large classification performance improvements. Lastly, we remove the need of any orthographic lexicon and instead exploit alternative unsupervised approaches to decoding speech in terms of automatically discovered word-like or phoneme-like units. We show that the spoken segment representations based on such lexical or phonetic discovery can achieve competitive classification performance as compared to those based on a domain-mismatched ASR or a universal phone set ASR
Bayesian models for unit discovery on a very low resource language
Accepted to ICASSP 2018International audienceDeveloping speech technologies for low-resource languages has become a very active research field over the last decade. Among others, Bayesian models have shown some promising results on artificial examples but still lack of in situ experiments. Our work applies state-of-the-art Bayesian models to unsupervised Acoustic Unit Discovery (AUD) in a real low-resource language scenario. We also show that Bayesian models can naturally integrate information from other resourceful languages by means of informative prior leading to more consistent discovered units. Finally, discovered acoustic units are used, either as the 1-best sequence or as a lattice, to perform word segmentation. Word segmentation results show that this Bayesian approach clearly outperforms a Segmental-DTW baseline on the same corpus
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