No Arabic abstract
In many applications of multi-microphone multi-device processing, the synchronization among different input channels can be affected by the lack of a common clock and isolated drops of samples. In this work, we address the issue of sample drop detection in the context of a conversational speech scenario, recorded by a set of microphones distributed in space. The goal is to design a neural-based model that given a short window in the time domain, detects whether one or more devices have been subjected to a sample drop event. The candidate time windows are selected from a set of large time intervals, possibly including a sample drop, and by using a preprocessing step. The latter is based on the application of normalized cross-correlation between signals acquired by different devices. The architecture of the neural network relies on a CNN-LSTM encoder, followed by multi-head attention. The experiments are conducted using both artificial and real data. Our proposed approach obtained F1 score of 88% on an evaluation set extracted from the CHiME-5 corpus. A comparable performance was found in a larger set of experiments conducted on a set of multi-channel artificial scenes.
We introduce asynchronous dynamic decoder, which adopts an efficient A* algorithm to incorporate big language models in the one-pass decoding for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. Unlike standard one-pass decoding with on-the-fly composition decoder which might induce a significant computation overhead, the asynchronous dynamic decoder has a novel design where it has two fronts, with one performing exploration and the other backfill. The computation of the two fronts alternates in the decoding process, resulting in more effective pruning than the standard one-pass decoding with an on-the-fly composition decoder. Experiments show that the proposed decoder works notably faster than the standard one-pass decoding with on-the-fly composition decoder, while the acceleration will be more obvious with the increment of data complexity.
Learned speech representations can drastically improve performance on tasks with limited labeled data. However, due to their size and complexity, learned representations have limited utility in mobile settings where run-time performance can be a significant bottleneck. In this work, we propose a class of lightweight non-semantic speech embedding models that run efficiently on mobile devices based on the recently proposed TRILL speech embedding. We combine novel architectural modifications with existing speed-up techniques to create embedding models that are fast enough to run in real-time on a mobile device and exhibit minimal performance degradation on a benchmark of non-semantic speech tasks. One such model (FRILL) is 32x faster on a Pixel 1 smartphone and 40% the size of TRILL, with an average decrease in accuracy of only 2%. To our knowledge, FRILL is the highest-quality non-semantic embedding designed for use on mobile devices. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these representations are useful for mobile health tasks such as non-speech human sounds detection and face-masked speech detection. Our models and code are publicly available.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown potential in learning emotional attributes and generating new data samples. However, their performance is usually hindered by the unavailability of larger speech emotion recognition (SER) data. In this work, we propose a framework that utilises the mixup data augmentation scheme to augment the GAN in feature learning and generation. To show the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we present results for SER on (i) synthetic feature vectors, (ii) augmentation of the training data with synthetic features, (iii) encoded features in compressed representation. Our results show that the proposed framework can effectively learn compressed emotional representations as well as it can generate synthetic samples that help improve performance in within-corpus and cross-corpus evaluation.
Speech emotion recognition is a challenging and important research topic that plays a critical role in human-computer interaction. Multimodal inputs can improve the performance as more emotional information is used for recognition. However, existing studies learnt all the information in the sample while only a small portion of it is about emotion. Moreover, under the multimodal framework, the interaction between different modalities is shallow and insufficient. In this paper, a keysparse Transformer is proposed for efficient SER by only focusing on emotion related information. Furthermore, a cascaded cross-attention block, which is specially designed for multimodal framework, is introduced to achieve deep interaction between different modalities. The proposed method is evaluated by IEMOCAP corpus and the experimental results show that the proposed method gives better performance than the state-of-theart approaches.
Speech emotion recognition is a crucial problem manifesting in a multitude of applications such as human computer interaction and education. Although several advancements have been made in the recent years, especially with the advent of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), most of the studies in the literature fail to consider the semantic information in the speech signal. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that can capture both the semantic and the paralinguistic information in the signal. In particular, our framework is comprised of a semantic feature extractor, that captures the semantic information, and a paralinguistic feature extractor, that captures the paralinguistic information. Both semantic and paraliguistic features are then combined to a unified representation using a novel attention mechanism. The unified feature vector is passed through a LSTM to capture the temporal dynamics in the signal, before the final prediction. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we use the popular SEWA dataset of the AVEC challenge series and compare with the three winning papers. Our model provides state-of-the-art results in the valence and liking dimensions.