arXiv research

This work tackles the problem of learning a set of language specific acoustic units from unlabeled speech recordings given a set of labeled recordings from other languages. Our approach may be described by the following two steps procedure: first the model learns the notion of acoustic units from the labelled data and …

Improved topic modeling captures temporal relationships in speech.

Speech Translation has always been about giving source text or audio input and waiting for system to give translated output in desired form. In this paper, we present the Acoustic Dialect Decoder (ADD) - a voice to voice ear-piece translation device. We introduce and survey the recent advances made in the field of Spee…

We present our first efforts in building an automatic speech recognition system for Somali, an under-resourced language, using 1.57 hrs of annotated speech for acoustic model training. The system is part of an ongoing effort by the United Nations (UN) to implement keyword spotting systems supporting humanitarian relief…

There is growing interest in being able to run neural networks on sensors, wearables and internet-of-things (IoT) devices. However, the computational demands of neural networks make them difficult to deploy on resource-constrained edge devices. To meet this need, our work introduces a new recurrent unit architecture th…

Improves TTS accuracy by correcting context-dependent units.

For decades, context-dependent phonemes have been the dominant sub-word unit for conventional acoustic modeling systems. This status quo has begun to be challenged recently by end-to-end models which seek to combine acoustic, pronunciation, and language model components into a single neural network. Such systems, which…

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 a…

In this paper we describe the recent advancements made in the IBM i-vector speaker recognition system for conversational speech. In particular, we identify key techniques that contribute to significant improvements in performance of our system, and quantify their contributions. The techniques include: 1) a nearest-neig…

Paper predicts EEG features from acoustic features using RNN and GAN.

Paper aims to find joint representation between vocal tract geometry and speech sound acoustics.

Study shows integrating acoustic features in financial forecasting models can degrade performance.

We introduce the new task of Acoustic Question Answering (AQA) to promote research in acoustic reasoning. The AQA task consists of analyzing an acoustic scene composed by a combination of elementary sounds and answering questions that relate the position and properties of these sounds. The kind of relational questions …

Recent advances in speech synthesis suggest that limitations such as the lossy nature of the amplitude spectrum with minimum phase approximation and the over-smoothing effect in acoustic modeling can be overcome by using advanced machine learning approaches. In this paper, we build a framework in which we can fairly co…

We present a supervised neural network model for polyphonic piano music transcription. The architecture of the proposed model is analogous to speech recognition systems and comprises an acoustic model and a music language model. The acoustic model is a neural network used for estimating the probabilities of pitches in …

Recent neural networks such as WaveNet and sampleRNN that learn directly from speech waveform samples have achieved very high-quality synthetic speech in terms of both naturalness and speaker similarity even in multi-speaker text-to-speech synthesis systems. Such neural networks are being used as an alternative to voco…

Very deep CNNs achieve state-of-the-art results in both computer vision and speech recognition, but are difficult to train. The most popular way to train very deep CNNs is to use shortcut connections (SC) together with batch normalization (BN). Inspired by Self- Normalizing Neural Networks, we propose the self-normaliz…

An audiovisual speaker conversion method is presented for simultaneously transforming the facial expressions and voice of a source speaker into those of a target speaker. Transforming the facial and acoustic features together makes it possible for the converted voice and facial expressions to be highly correlated and f…

This paper introduces a model of environmental acoustic scenes which adopts a morphological approach by ab-stracting temporal structures of acoustic scenes. To demonstrate its potential, this model is employed to evaluate the performance of a large set of acoustic events detection systems. This model allows us to expli…

Acoustic Neighbor Embeddings map speech and text to fixed dimensions for phonetic confusability.

We present a novel deep Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model for acoustic modelling in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We term our contribution as a TC-DNN-BLSTM-DNN model, the model combines a Deep Neural Network (DNN) with Time Convolution (TC), followed by a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM), and a fi…

Environmental acoustic sensing involves the retrieval and processing of audio signals to better understand our surroundings. While large-scale acoustic data make manual analysis infeasible, they provide a suitable playground for machine learning approaches. Most existing machine learning techniques developed for enviro…

Geometric model explains music perception combining neuroscience and acoustics.

We have recently shown that deep Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNNs) outperform feed forward deep neural networks (DNNs) as acoustic models for speech recognition. More recently, we have shown that the performance of sequence trained context dependent (CD) hidden Markov model (HMM) acoustic m…

Acoustic word embeddings --- fixed-dimensional vector representations of arbitrary-length words --- have attracted increasing interest in query-by-example spoken term detection. Recently, on the fact that the orthography of text labels partly reflects the phonetic similarity between the words' pronunciation, a multi-vi…

Research into automated systems for detecting and classifying marine mammals in acoustic recordings is expanding internationally due to the necessity to analyze large collections of data for conservation purposes. In this work, we present a Convolutional Neural Network that is capable of classifying the vocalizations o…

We study large-scale kernel methods for acoustic modeling and compare to DNNs on performance metrics related to both acoustic modeling and recognition. Measuring perplexity and frame-level classification accuracy, kernel-based acoustic models are as effective as their DNN counterparts. However, on token-error-rates DNN…

We introduce the task of acoustic question answering (AQA) in the area of acoustic reasoning. In this task an agent learns to answer questions on the basis of acoustic context. In order to promote research in this area, we propose a data generation paradigm adapted from CLEVR (Johnson et al. 2017). We generate acoustic…

U-Net trained to recover acoustic interference striations from distorted data.

Meta-learning improves few-shot acoustic event detection.

In this paper, we propose a classification based glottal closure instants (GCI) detection from pathological acoustic speech signal, which finds many applications in vocal disorder analysis. Till date, GCI for pathological disorder is extracted from laryngeal (glottal source) signal recorded from Electroglottograph, a d…

Constructing a dataset for replay spoofing detection requires a physical process of playing an utterance and re-recording it, presenting a challenge to the collection of large-scale datasets. In this study, we propose a self-supervised framework for pretraining acoustic configurations using datasets published for other…

Improved ASR for English-isiZulu code-switched speech with semi-supervised training.

Improved multi-modal emotion recognition using deep learning.

Biodiversity monitoring using audio recordings is achievable at a truly global scale via large-scale deployment of inexpensive, unattended recording stations or by large-scale crowdsourcing using recording and species recognition on mobile devices. The ability, however, to reliably identify vocalising animal species is…

Traditional automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often use an acoustic model (AM) built on handcrafted acoustic features, such as log Mel-filter bank (FBANK) values. Recent studies found that AMs with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can directly use the raw waveform signal as input. Given sufficient training…

Speech-driven visual speech synthesis involves mapping features extracted from acoustic speech to the corresponding lip animation controls for a face model. This mapping can take many forms, but a powerful approach is to use deep neural networks (DNNs). However, a limitation is the lack of synchronized audio, video, an…

Acoustic scene classification is the task of identifying the scene from which the audio signal is recorded. Convolutional neural network (CNN) models are widely adopted with proven successes in acoustic scene classification. However, there is little insight on how an audio scene is perceived in CNN, as what have been d…

Improves speech recognition in noisy environments using robust acoustic models.

Vanishing long-term gradients are a major issue in training standard recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which can be alleviated by long short-term memory (LSTM) models with memory cells. However, the extra parameters associated with the memory cells mean an LSTM layer has four times as many parameters as an RNN with the…

CNNs improve generalization to unseen audio devices with increased width, not depth.

In this work, three lattice-free (LF) discriminative training criteria for purely sequence-trained neural network acoustic models are compared on LVCSR tasks, namely maximum mutual information (MMI), boosted maximum mutual information (bMMI) and state-level minimum Bayes risk (sMBR). We demonstrate that, analogous to L…

Most speech recognition tasks pertain to mapping words across two modalities: acoustic and orthographic. In this work, we suggest learning encoders that map variable-length, acoustic or phonetic, sequences that represent words into fixed-dimensional vectors in a shared latent space; such that the distance between two w…

New method improves anomaly detection in acoustic signals.

New method estimates animal density using acoustic data, accounting for unknown call identities.

Adversarial domain-invariant training (ADIT) proves to be effective in suppressing the effects of domain variability in acoustic modeling and has led to improved performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR). In ADIT, an auxiliary domain classifier takes in equally-weighted deep features from a deep neural network …

Transformer with self-attention has achieved great success in the area of nature language processing. Recently, there have been a few studies on transformer for end-to-end speech recognition, while its application for hybrid acoustic model is still very limited. In this paper, we revisit the transformer-based hybrid ac…

In acoustic scene classification researches, audio segment is usually split into multiple samples. Majority voting is then utilized to ensemble the results of the samples. In this paper, we propose a punishment voting algorithm based on the super categories construction method for acoustic scene classification. Specifi…