Effective Pitch Value Detection in Noisy Intelligent Environments for Efficient Natural Language Processing

The performance of applications based on natural language processing depends primarily on the environment in which these applications are applied. Intelligent environments will be one of the major applications used to process natural language. The methods for speaker’s gender classification can adapt and improve the performance of natural language processing applications. That is why, this chapter will present an effective speaker’s pitch value detection in noisy environments, which then allows more robust speaker’s gender classification. The chapter presents the algorithm for the speaker’s pitch value detection and performs the comparison in various noisy environments. The experiments are carried out on the part of the publically available Aurora 2 speech database. The results showed that the automatically determined pitch values deviate, on average, only by 8.39 Hz from the reference pitch value. A well-defined pitch value allows a functional speaker’s gender classification. In this chapter, presented speaker’s gender classification works well, even at low signal to noise ratios. The experiments show that the speaker’s gender classification performance at SNR 0 dB is higher than 91% when the automatically determined pitch value is used. Speaker’s gender classification can then be used further in the processes of natural language processing

The Slovene BNSI Broadcast News database and reference speech corpus GOS: Towards the uniform guidelines for future work

Abstract The aim of the paper is to search for common guidelines for the future development of speech databases for less resourced languages in order to make them the most useful for both main fields of their use, linguistic research and speech technologies. We compare two standards for creating speech databases, one followed when developing the Slovene speech database for automatic speech recognition -BNSI Broadcast News, the other followed when developing the Slovene reference speech corpus GOS, and outline possible common guidelines for future work. We also present an add-on for the GOS corpus, which enables its usage for automatic speech recognition

Avtomatsko razpoznavanja slovenskega govora za dnevnoinformativne oddaje

Na področju govornih in jezikovnih tehnologij predstavlja avtomatsko razpoznavanje govora enega izmed ključnih gradnikov. V prispevku bomo predstavili razvoj avtomatskega razpoznavalnika slovenskega govora za domeno dnevnoinformativnih oddaj. Arhitektura sistema je zasnovana na globokih nevronskih mrežah. Pri tem smo ob upoštevanju razpoložljivih govornih virov izvedli modeliranje z različnimi aktivacijskimi funkcijami. V postopku razvoja razpoznavalnika govora smo preverili tudi, kakšen je vpliv izgubnih govornih kodekov na rezultate razpoznavanja govora. Za učenje razpoznavalnika govora smo uporabili bazi UMB BNSI Broadcast News in IETK-TV. Skupni obseg govornih posnetkov je znašal 66 ur. Vzporedno z globokimi nevronskimi mrežami smo povečali slovar razpoznavanja govora, ki je tako znašal 250.000 besed. Na ta način smo znižali delež besed izven slovarja na 1,33 %. Z razpoznavanjem govora na testni množici smo dosegli najboljšo stopnjo napačno razpoznanih besed (WER) 15,17 %. Med procesom vrednotenja rezultatov smo izvedli tudi podrobnejšo analizo napak razpoznavanja govora na osnovi lem in F-razredov, ki v določeni meri pokažejo na zahtevnost slovenskega jezika za takšne scenarije uporabe tehnologije