End-to-end (E2E) systems have achieved competitive results compared to conventional hybrid hidden Markov model (HMM)-deep neural network based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Such E2E systems are attractive due to the lack of dependence on alignments between input acoustic and output grapheme or HMM state sequence during training. This paper explores the design of an ASR-free end-to-end system for text query-based keyword search (KWS) from speech trained with minimal supervision. Our E2E KWS system consists of three sub-systems. The first sub-system is a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based acoustic auto-encoder trained to reconstruct the audio through a finite-dimensional representation. The second sub-system is a character-level RNN language model using embeddings learned from a convolutional neural network. Since the acoustic and text query embeddings occupy different representation spaces, they are input to a third feed-forward neural network that predicts whether the query occurs in the acoustic utterance or not. This E2E ASR-free KWS system performs respectably despite lacking a conventional ASR system and trains much faster.
In this paper, we propose to use pre-trained features from end-to-end ASR models to solve speech sentiment analysis as a down-stream task. We show that end-to-end ASR features, which integrate both acoustic and text information from speech, achieve promising results. We use RNN with self-attention as the sentiment classifier, which also provides an easy visualization through attention weights to help interpret model predictions. We use well benchmarked IEMOCAP dataset and a new large-scale speech sentiment dataset SWBD-sentiment for evaluation. Our approach improves the-state-of-the-art accuracy on IEMOCAP from 66.6% to 71.7%, and achieves an accuracy of 70.10% on SWBD-sentiment with more than 49,500 utterances.
Recently, neural approaches to spoken content retrieval have become popular. However, they tend to be restricted in their vocabulary or in their ability to deal with imbalanced test settings. These restrictions limit their applicability in keyword search, where the set of queries is not known beforehand, and where the system should return not just whether an utterance contains a query but the exact location of any such occurrences. In this work, we propose a model directly optimized for keyword search. The model takes a query and an utterance as input and returns a sequence of probabilities for each frame of the utterance of the query having occurred in that frame. Experiments show that the proposed model not only outperforms similar end-to-end models on a task where the ratio of positive and negative trials is artificially balanced, but it is also able to deal with the far more challenging task of keyword search with its inherent imbalance. Furthermore, using our system to rescore the outputs an LVCSR-based keyword search system leads to significant improvements on the latter.
We describe a sequence-to-sequence neural network which directly generates speech waveforms from text inputs. The architecture extends the Tacotron model by incorporating a normalizing flow into the autoregressive decoder loop. Output waveforms are modeled as a sequence of non-overlapping fixed-length blocks, each one containing hundreds of samples. The interdependencies of waveform samples within each block are modeled using the normalizing flow, enabling parallel training and synthesis. Longer-term dependencies are handled autoregressively by conditioning each flow on preceding blocks.This model can be optimized directly with maximum likelihood, with-out using intermediate, hand-designed features nor additional loss terms. Contemporary state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) systems use a cascade of separately learned models: one (such as Tacotron) which generates intermediate features (such as spectrograms) from text, followed by a vocoder (such as WaveRNN) which generates waveform samples from the intermediate features. The proposed system, in contrast, does not use a fixed intermediate representation, and learns all parameters end-to-end. Experiments show that the proposed model generates speech with quality approaching a state-of-the-art neural TTS system, with significantly improved generation speed.
Spoken language translation applications for speech suffer due to conversational speech phenomena, particularly the presence of disfluencies. With the rise of end-to-end speech translation models, processing steps such as disfluency removal that were previously an intermediate step between speech recognition and machine translation need to be incorporated into model architectures. We use a sequence-to-sequence model to translate from noisy, disfluent speech to fluent text with disfluencies removed using the recently collected `copy-edited references for the Fisher Spanish-English dataset. We are able to directly generate fluent translations and introduce considerations about how to evaluate success on this task. This work provides a baseline for a new task, the translation of conversational speech with joint removal of disfluencies.
Many of the current state-of-the-art Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition Systems (LVCSR) are hybrids of neural networks and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Most of these systems contain separate components that deal with the acoustic modelling, language modelling and sequence decoding. We investigate a more direct approach in which the HMM is replaced with a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that performs sequence prediction directly at the character level. Alignment between the input features and the desired character sequence is learned automatically by an attention mechanism built into the RNN. For each predicted character, the attention mechanism scans the input sequence and chooses relevant frames. We propose two methods to speed up this operation: limiting the scan to a subset of most promising frames and pooling over time the information contained in neighboring frames, thereby reducing source sequence length. Integrating an n-gram language model into the decoding process yields recognition accuracies similar to other HMM-free RNN-based approaches.