Temporally Varying Weight Regression for Speech Recognition

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Speech Recognition

Chapters in the first part of the book cover all the essential speech processing techniques for building robust, automatic speech recognition systems: the representation for speech signals and the methods for speech-features extraction, acoustic and language modeling, efficient algorithms for searching the hypothesis space, and multimodal approaches to speech recognition. The last part of the book is devoted to other speech processing applications that can use the information from automatic speech recognition for speaker identification and tracking, for prosody modeling in emotion-detection systems and in other speech processing applications that are able to operate in real-world environments, like mobile communication services and smart homes

Unsupervised learning for text-to-speech synthesis

This thesis introduces a general method for incorporating the distributional analysis of textual and linguistic objects into text-to-speech (TTS) conversion systems. Conventional TTS conversion uses intermediate layers of representation to bridge the gap between text and speech. Collecting the annotated data needed to produce these intermediate layers is a far from trivial task, possibly prohibitively so for languages in which no such resources are in existence. Distributional analysis, in contrast, proceeds in an unsupervised manner, and so enables the creation of systems using textual data that are not annotated. The method therefore aids the building of systems for languages in which conventional linguistic resources are scarce, but is not restricted to these languages. The distributional analysis proposed here places the textual objects analysed in a continuous-valued space, rather than specifying a hard categorisation of those objects. This space is then partitioned during the training of acoustic models for synthesis, so that the models generalise over objects' surface forms in a way that is acoustically relevant. The method is applied to three levels of textual analysis: to the characterisation of sub-syllabic units, word units and utterances. Entire systems for three languages (English, Finnish and Romanian) are built with no reliance on manually labelled data or language-specific expertise. Results of a subjective evaluation are presented

Dysarthric speech analysis and automatic recognition using phase based representations

Dysarthria is a neurological speech impairment which usually results in the loss of motor speech control due to muscular atrophy and poor coordination of articulators. Dysarthric speech is more difficult to model with machine learning algorithms, due to inconsistencies in the acoustic signal and to limited amounts of training data. This study reports a new approach for the analysis and representation of dysarthric speech, and applies it to improve ASR performance. The Zeros of Z-Transform (ZZT) are investigated for dysarthric vowel segments. It shows evidence of a phase-based acoustic phenomenon that is responsible for the way the distribution of zero patterns relate to speech intelligibility. It is investigated whether such phase-based artefacts can be systematically exploited to understand their association with intelligibility. A metric based on the phase slope deviation (PSD) is introduced that are observed in the unwrapped phase spectrum of dysarthric vowel segments. The metric compares the differences between the slopes of dysarthric vowels and typical vowels. The PSD shows a strong and nearly linear correspondence with the intelligibility of the speaker, and it is shown to hold for two separate databases of dysarthric speakers. A systematic procedure for correcting the underlying phase deviations results in a significant improvement in ASR performance for speakers with severe and moderate dysarthria. In addition, information encoded in the phase component of the Fourier transform of dysarthric speech is exploited in the group delay spectrum. Its properties are found to represent disordered speech more effectively than the magnitude spectrum. Dysarthric ASR performance was significantly improved using phase-based cepstral features in comparison to the conventional MFCCs. A combined approach utilising the benefits of PSD corrections and phase-based features was found to surpass all the previous performance on the UASPEECH database of dysarthric speech

Linear dynamic models for automatic speech recognition

The majority of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems rely on hidden Markov models (HMM), in which the output distribution associated with each state is modelled by a mixture of diagonal covariance Gaussians. Dynamic information is typically included by appending time-derivatives to feature vectors. This approach, whilst successful, makes the false assumption of framewise independence of the augmented feature vectors and ignores the spatial correlations in the parametrised speech signal. This dissertation seeks to address these shortcomings by exploring acoustic modelling for ASR with an application of a form of state-space model, the linear dynamic model (LDM). Rather than modelling individual frames of data, LDMs characterize entire segments of speech. An auto-regressive state evolution through a continuous space gives a Markovian model of the underlying dynamics, and spatial correlations between feature dimensions are absorbed into the structure of the observation process. LDMs have been applied to speech recognition before, however a smoothed Gauss-Markov form was used which ignored the potential for subspace modelling. The continuous dynamical state means that information is passed along the length of each segment. Furthermore, if the state is allowed to be continuous across segment boundaries, long range dependencies are built into the system and the assumption of independence of successive segments is loosened. The state provides an explicit model of temporal correlation which sets this approach apart from frame-based and some segment-based models where the ordering of the data is unimportant. The benefits of such a model are examined both within and between segments. LDMs are well suited to modelling smoothly varying, continuous, yet noisy trajectories such as found in measured articulatory data. Using speaker-dependent data from the MOCHA corpus, the performance of systems which model acoustic, articulatory, and combined acoustic-articulatory features are compared. As well as measured articulatory parameters, experiments use the output of neural networks trained to perform an articulatory inversion mapping. The speaker-independent TIMIT corpus provides the basis for larger scale acoustic-only experiments. Classification tasks provide an ideal means to compare modelling choices without the confounding influence of recognition search errors, and are used to explore issues such as choice of state dimension, front-end acoustic parametrization and parameter initialization. Recognition for segment models is typically more computationally expensive than for frame-based models. Unlike frame-level models, it is not always possible to share likelihood calculations for observation sequences which occur within hypothesized segments that have different start and end times. Furthermore, the Viterbi criterion is not necessarily applicable at the frame level. This work introduces a novel approach to decoding for segment models in the form of a stack decoder with A* search. Such a scheme allows flexibility in the choice of acoustic and language models since the Viterbi criterion is not integral to the search, and hypothesis generation is independent of the particular language model. Furthermore, the time-asynchronous ordering of the search means that only likely paths are extended, and so a minimum number of models are evaluated. The decoder is used to give full recognition results for feature-sets derived from the MOCHA and TIMIT corpora. Conventional train/test divisions and choice of language model are used so that results can be directly compared to those in other studies. The decoder is also used to implement Viterbi training, in which model parameters are alternately updated and then used to re-align the training data

Spoken command recognition for robotics

In this thesis, I investigate spoken command recognition technology for robotics. While high robustness is expected, the distant and noisy conditions in which the system has to operate make the task very challenging. Unlike commercial systems which all rely on a "wake-up" word to initiate the interaction, the pipeline proposed here directly detect and recognizes commands from the continuous audio stream. In order to keep the task manageable despite low-resource conditions, I propose to focus on a limited set of commands, thus trading off flexibility of the system against robustness. Domain and speaker adaptation strategies based on a multi-task regularization paradigm are first explored. More precisely, two different methods are proposed which rely on a tied loss function which penalizes the distance between the output of several networks. The first method considers each speaker or domain as a task. A canonical task-independent network is jointly trained with task-dependent models, allowing both types of networks to improve by learning from one another. While an improvement of 3.2% on the frame error rate (FER) of the task-independent network is obtained, this only partially carried over to the phone error rate (PER), with 1.5% of improvement. Similarly, a second method explored the parallel training of the canonical network with a privileged model having access to i-vectors. This method proved less effective with only 1.2% of improvement on the FER. In order to make the developed technology more accessible, I also investigated the use of a sequence-to-sequence (S2S) architecture for command classification. The use of an attention-based encoder-decoder model reduced the classification error by 40% relative to a strong convolutional neural network (CNN)-hidden Markov model (HMM) baseline, showing the relevance of S2S architectures in such context. In order to improve the flexibility of the trained system, I also explored strategies for few-shot learning, which allow to extend the set of commands with minimum requirements in terms of data. Retraining a model on the combination of original and new commands, I managed to achieve 40.5% of accuracy on the new commands with only 10 examples for each of them. This scores goes up to 81.5% of accuracy with a larger set of 100 examples per new command. An alternative strategy, based on model adaptation achieved even better scores, with 68.8% and 88.4% of accuracy with 10 and 100 examples respectively, while being faster to train. This high performance is obtained at the expense of the original categories though, on which the accuracy deteriorated. Those results are very promising as the methods allow to easily extend an existing S2S model with minimal resources. Finally, a full spoken command recognition system (named iCubrec) has been developed for the iCub platform. The pipeline relies on a voice activity detection (VAD) system to propose a fully hand-free experience. By segmenting only regions that are likely to contain commands, the VAD module also allows to reduce greatly the computational cost of the pipeline. Command candidates are then passed to the deep neural network (DNN)-HMM command recognition system for transcription. The VoCub dataset has been specifically gathered to train a DNN-based acoustic model for our task. Through multi-condition training with the CHiME4 dataset, an accuracy of 94.5% is reached on VoCub test set. A filler model, complemented by a rejection mechanism based on a confidence score, is finally added to the system to reject non-command speech in a live demonstration of the system