2024-03-31 更新
Online speaker diarization of meetings guided by speech separation
Authors:Elio Gruttadauria, Mathieu Fontaine, Slim Essid
Overlapped speech is notoriously problematic for speaker diarization systems. Consequently, the use of speech separation has recently been proposed to improve their performance. Although promising, speech separation models struggle with realistic data because they are trained on simulated mixtures with a fixed number of speakers. In this work, we introduce a new speech separation-guided diarization scheme suitable for the online speaker diarization of long meeting recordings with a variable number of speakers, as present in the AMI corpus. We envisage ConvTasNet and DPRNN as alternatives for the separation networks, with two or three output sources. To obtain the speaker diarization result, voice activity detection is applied on each estimated source. The final model is fine-tuned end-to-end, after first adapting the separation to real data using AMI. The system operates on short segments, and inference is performed by stitching the local predictions using speaker embeddings and incremental clustering. The results show that our system improves the state-of-the-art on the AMI headset mix, using no oracle information and under full evaluation (no collar and including overlapped speech). Finally, we show the strength of our system particularly on overlapped speech sections.
PDF Accepted at ICASSP 2024
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Enhancing the Stability of LLM-based Speech Generation Systems through Self-Supervised Representations
Authors:Álvaro Martín-Cortinas, Daniel Sáez-Trigueros, Iván Vallés-Pérez, Biel Tura-Vecino, Piotr Biliński, Mateusz Lajszczak, Grzegorz Beringer, Roberto Barra-Chicote, Jaime Lorenzo-Trueba
Large Language Models (LLMs) are one of the most promising technologies for the next era of speech generation systems, due to their scalability and in-context learning capabilities. Nevertheless, they suffer from multiple stability issues at inference time, such as hallucinations, content skipping or speech repetitions. In this work, we introduce a new self-supervised Voice Conversion (VC) architecture which can be used to learn to encode transitory features, such as content, separately from stationary ones, such as speaker ID or recording conditions, creating speaker-disentangled representations. Using speaker-disentangled codes to train LLMs for text-to-speech (TTS) allows the LLM to generate the content and the style of the speech only from the text, similarly to humans, while the speaker identity is provided by the decoder of the VC model. Results show that LLMs trained over speaker-disentangled self-supervised representations provide an improvement of 4.7pp in speaker similarity over SOTA entangled representations, and a word error rate (WER) 5.4pp lower. Furthermore, they achieve higher naturalness than human recordings of the LibriTTS test-other dataset. Finally, we show that using explicit reference embedding negatively impacts intelligibility (stability), with WER increasing by 14pp compared to the model that only uses text to infer the style.
PDF 10 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables
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Listen, Chat, and Edit: Text-Guided Soundscape Modification for Enhanced Auditory Experience
Authors:Xilin Jiang, Cong Han, Yinghao Aaron Li, Nima Mesgarani
In daily life, we encounter a variety of sounds, both desirable and undesirable, with limited control over their presence and volume. Our work introduces “Listen, Chat, and Edit” (LCE), a novel multimodal sound mixture editor that modifies each sound source in a mixture based on user-provided text instructions. LCE distinguishes itself with a user-friendly chat interface and its unique ability to edit multiple sound sources simultaneously within a mixture, without needing to separate them. Users input open-vocabulary text prompts, which are interpreted by a large language model to create a semantic filter for editing the sound mixture. The system then decomposes the mixture into its components, applies the semantic filter, and reassembles it into the desired output. We developed a 160-hour dataset with over 100k mixtures, including speech and various audio sources, along with text prompts for diverse editing tasks like extraction, removal, and volume control. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in signal quality across all editing tasks and robust performance in zero-shot scenarios with varying numbers and types of sound sources.
PDF preprint
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Speech Emotion Recognition Via CNN-Transforemr and Multidimensional Attention Mechanism
Authors:Xiaoyu Tang, Yixin Lin, Ting Dang, Yuanfang Zhang, Jintao Cheng
Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is crucial in human-machine interactions. Mainstream approaches utilize Convolutional Neural Networks or Recurrent Neural Networks to learn local energy feature representations of speech segments from speech information, but struggle with capturing global information such as the duration of energy in speech. Some use Transformers to capture global information, but there is room for improvement in terms of parameter count and performance. Furthermore, existing attention mechanisms focus on spatial or channel dimensions, hindering learning of important temporal information in speech. In this paper, to model local and global information at different levels of granularity in speech and capture temporal, spatial and channel dependencies in speech signals, we propose a Speech Emotion Recognition network based on CNN-Transformer and multi-dimensional attention mechanisms. Specifically, a stack of CNN blocks is dedicated to capturing local information in speech from a time-frequency perspective. In addition, a time-channel-space attention mechanism is used to enhance features across three dimensions. Moreover, we model local and global dependencies of feature sequences using large convolutional kernels with depthwise separable convolutions and lightweight Transformer modules. We evaluate the proposed method on IEMOCAP and Emo-DB datasets and show our approach significantly improves the performance over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available on https://github.com/SCNU-RISLAB/CNN-Transforemr-and-Multidimensional-Attention-Mechanism
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How to train your ears: Auditory-model emulation for large-dynamic-range inputs and mild-to-severe hearing losses
Authors:Peter Leer, Jesper Jensen, Zheng-Hua Tan, Jan Østergaard, Lars Bramsløw
Advanced auditory models are useful in designing signal-processing algorithms for hearing-loss compensation or speech enhancement. Such auditory models provide rich and detailed descriptions of the auditory pathway, and might allow for individualization of signal-processing strategies, based on physiological measurements. However, these auditory models are often computationally demanding, requiring significant time to compute. To address this issue, previous studies have explored the use of deep neural networks to emulate auditory models and reduce inference time. While these deep neural networks offer impressive efficiency gains in terms of computational time, they may suffer from uneven emulation performance as a function of auditory-model frequency-channels and input sound pressure level, making them unsuitable for many tasks. In this study, we demonstrate that the conventional machine-learning optimization objective used in existing state-of-the-art methods is the primary source of this limitation. Specifically, the optimization objective fails to account for the frequency- and level-dependencies of the auditory model, caused by a large input dynamic range and different types of hearing losses emulated by the auditory model. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new optimization objective that explicitly embeds the frequency- and level-dependencies of the auditory model. Our results show that this new optimization objective significantly improves the emulation performance of deep neural networks across relevant input sound levels and auditory-model frequency channels, without increasing the computational load during inference. Addressing these limitations is essential for advancing the application of auditory models in signal-processing tasks, ensuring their efficacy in diverse scenarios.
PDF Accepted by IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing. This version is the authors’ version and may vary from the final publication in details
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ScanTalk: 3D Talking Heads from Unregistered Scans
Authors:Federico Nocentini, Thomas Besnier, Claudio Ferrari, Sylvain Arguillere, Stefano Berretti, Mohamed Daoudi
Speech-driven 3D talking heads generation has emerged as a significant area of interest among researchers, presenting numerous challenges. Existing methods are constrained by animating faces with fixed topologies, wherein point-wise correspondence is established, and the number and order of points remains consistent across all identities the model can animate. In this work, we present ScanTalk, a novel framework capable of animating 3D faces in arbitrary topologies including scanned data. Our approach relies on the DiffusionNet architecture to overcome the fixed topology constraint, offering promising avenues for more flexible and realistic 3D animations. By leveraging the power of DiffusionNet, ScanTalk not only adapts to diverse facial structures but also maintains fidelity when dealing with scanned data, thereby enhancing the authenticity and versatility of generated 3D talking heads. Through comprehensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods, we validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating its capacity to generate realistic talking heads comparable to existing techniques. While our primary objective is to develop a generic method free from topological constraints, all state-of-the-art methodologies are bound by such limitations. Code for reproducing our results, and the pre-trained model will be made available.
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Exploring Tokenization Strategies and Vocabulary Sizes for Enhanced Arabic Language Models
Authors:Mohamed Taher Alrefaie, Nour Eldin Morsy, Nada Samir
This paper presents a comprehensive examination of the impact of tokenization strategies and vocabulary sizes on the performance of Arabic language models in downstream natural language processing tasks. Our investigation focused on the effectiveness of four tokenizers across various tasks, including News Classification, Hate Speech Detection, Sentiment Analysis, and Natural Language Inference. Leveraging a diverse set of vocabulary sizes, we scrutinize the intricate interplay between tokenization approaches and model performance. The results reveal that Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) with Farasa outperforms other strategies in multiple tasks, underscoring the significance of morphological analysis in capturing the nuances of the Arabic language. However, challenges arise in sentiment analysis, where dialect specific segmentation issues impact model efficiency. Computational efficiency analysis demonstrates the stability of BPE with Farasa, suggesting its practical viability. Our study uncovers limited impacts of vocabulary size on model performance while keeping the model size unchanged. This is challenging the established beliefs about the relationship between vocabulary, model size, and downstream tasks, emphasizing the need for the study of models’ size and their corresponding vocabulary size to generalize across domains and mitigate biases, particularly in dialect based datasets. Paper’s recommendations include refining tokenization strategies to address dialect challenges, enhancing model robustness across diverse linguistic contexts, and expanding datasets to encompass the rich dialect based Arabic. This work not only advances our understanding of Arabic language models but also lays the foundation for responsible and ethical developments in natural language processing technologies tailored to the intricacies of the Arabic language.
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FlowerFormer: Empowering Neural Architecture Encoding using a Flow-aware Graph Transformer
Authors:Dongyeong Hwang, Hyunju Kim, Sunwoo Kim, Kijung Shin
The success of a specific neural network architecture is closely tied to the dataset and task it tackles; there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Thus, considerable efforts have been made to quickly and accurately estimate the performances of neural architectures, without full training or evaluation, for given tasks and datasets. Neural architecture encoding has played a crucial role in the estimation, and graphbased methods, which treat an architecture as a graph, have shown prominent performance. For enhanced representation learning of neural architectures, we introduce FlowerFormer, a powerful graph transformer that incorporates the information flows within a neural architecture. FlowerFormer consists of two key components: (a) bidirectional asynchronous message passing, inspired by the flows; (b) global attention built on flow-based masking. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of FlowerFormer over existing neural encoding methods, and its effectiveness extends beyond computer vision models to include graph neural networks and auto speech recognition models. Our code is available at http://github.com/y0ngjaenius/CVPR2024_FLOWERFormer.
PDF CVPR 2024 Camera-Ready
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SynerMix: Synergistic Mixup Solution for Enhanced Intra-Class Cohesion and Inter-Class Separability in Image Classification
Authors:Ye Xu, Ya Gao, Xiaorong Qiu, Yang Chen, Ying Ji
To address the issues of MixUp and its variants (e.g., Manifold MixUp) in image classification tasks-namely, their neglect of mixing within the same class (intra-class mixup) and their inadequacy in enhancing intra-class cohesion through their mixing operations-we propose a novel mixup method named SynerMix-Intra and, building upon this, introduce a synergistic mixup solution named SynerMix. SynerMix-Intra specifically targets intra-class mixup to bolster intra-class cohesion, a feature not addressed by current mixup methods. For each mini-batch, it leverages feature representations of unaugmented original images from each class to generate a synthesized feature representation through random linear interpolation. All synthesized representations are then fed into the classification and loss layers to calculate an average classification loss that significantly enhances intra-class cohesion. Furthermore, SynerMix combines SynerMix-Intra with an existing mixup approach (e.g., MixUp, Manifold MixUp), which primarily focuses on inter-class mixup and has the benefit of enhancing inter-class separability. In doing so, it integrates both inter- and intra-class mixup in a balanced way while concurrently improving intra-class cohesion and inter-class separability. Experimental results on six datasets show that SynerMix achieves a 0.1% to 3.43% higher accuracy than the best of either MixUp or SynerMix-Intra alone, averaging a 1.16% gain. It also surpasses the top-performer of either Manifold MixUp or SynerMix-Intra by 0.12% to 5.16%, with an average gain of 1.11%. Given that SynerMix is model-agnostic, it holds significant potential for application in other domains where mixup methods have shown promise, such as speech and text classification. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/wxitxy/synermix.git.
PDF 25 pages,12 figures
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Unified Static and Dynamic Network: Efficient Temporal Filtering for Video Grounding
Authors:Jingjing Hu, Dan Guo, Kun Li, Zhan Si, Xun Yang, Xiaojun Chang, Meng Wang
Inspired by the activity-silent and persistent activity mechanisms in human visual perception biology, we design a Unified Static and Dynamic Network (UniSDNet), to learn the semantic association between the video and text/audio queries in a cross-modal environment for efficient video grounding. For static modeling, we devise a novel residual structure (ResMLP) to boost the global comprehensive interaction between the video segments and queries, achieving more effective semantic enhancement/supplement. For dynamic modeling, we effectively exploit three characteristics of the persistent activity mechanism in our network design for a better video context comprehension. Specifically, we construct a diffusely connected video clip graph on the basis of 2D sparse temporal masking to reflect the “short-term effect” relationship. We innovatively consider the temporal distance and relevance as the joint “auxiliary evidence clues” and design a multi-kernel Temporal Gaussian Filter to expand the context clue into high-dimensional space, simulating the “complex visual perception”, and then conduct element level filtering convolution operations on neighbour clip nodes in message passing stage for finally generating and ranking the candidate proposals. Our UniSDNet is applicable to both Natural Language Video Grounding (NLVG) and Spoken Language Video Grounding (SLVG) tasks. Our UniSDNet achieves SOTA performance on three widely used datasets for NLVG, as well as three datasets for SLVG, e.g., reporting new records at 38.88% R@1,IoU@0.7 on ActivityNet Captions and 40.26% R@1,IoU@0.5 on TACoS. To facilitate this field, we collect two new datasets (Charades-STA Speech and TACoS Speech) for SLVG task. Meanwhile, the inference speed of our UniSDNet is 1.56$\times$ faster than the strong multi-query benchmark. Code is available at: https://github.com/xian-sh/UniSDNet.
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A Multimodal Approach to Device-Directed Speech Detection with Large Language Models
Authors:Dominik Wagner, Alexander Churchill, Siddharth Sigtia, Panayiotis Georgiou, Matt Mirsamadi, Aarshee Mishra, Erik Marchi
Interactions with virtual assistants typically start with a predefined trigger phrase followed by the user command. To make interactions with the assistant more intuitive, we explore whether it is feasible to drop the requirement that users must begin each command with a trigger phrase. We explore this task in three ways: First, we train classifiers using only acoustic information obtained from the audio waveform. Second, we take the decoder outputs of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, such as 1-best hypotheses, as input features to a large language model (LLM). Finally, we explore a multimodal system that combines acoustic and lexical features, as well as ASR decoder signals in an LLM. Using multimodal information yields relative equal-error-rate improvements over text-only and audio-only models of up to 39% and 61%. Increasing the size of the LLM and training with low-rank adaption leads to further relative EER reductions of up to 18% on our dataset.
PDF arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2312.03632
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InternVideo2: Scaling Video Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding
Authors:Yi Wang, Kunchang Li, Xinhao Li, Jiashuo Yu, Yinan He, Guo Chen, Baoqi Pei, Rongkun Zheng, Jilan Xu, Zun Wang, Yansong Shi, Tianxiang Jiang, Songze Li, Hongjie Zhang, Yifei Huang, Yu Qiao, Yali Wang, Limin Wang
We introduce InternVideo2, a new video foundation model (ViFM) that achieves the state-of-the-art performance in action recognition, video-text tasks, and video-centric dialogue. Our approach employs a progressive training paradigm that unifies the different self- or weakly-supervised learning frameworks of masked video token reconstruction, cross-modal contrastive learning, and next token prediction. Different training stages would guide our model to capture different levels of structure and semantic information through different pretext tasks. At the data level, we prioritize the spatiotemporal consistency by semantically segmenting videos and generating video-audio-speech captions. This improves the alignment between video and text. We scale both data and model size for our InternVideo2. Through extensive experiments, we validate our designs and demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance on over 60 video and audio tasks. Notably, our model outperforms others on various video-related captioning, dialogue, and long video understanding benchmarks, highlighting its ability to reason and comprehend long temporal contexts. Code and models are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternVideo2/.
PDF a technical report about video understanding
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Advanced Artificial Intelligence Algorithms in Cochlear Implants: Review of Healthcare Strategies, Challenges, and Perspectives
Authors:Billel Essaid, Hamza Kheddar, Noureddine Batel, Abderrahmane Lakas, Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) plays a pivotal role in our daily lives, offering utility not only for interacting with machines but also for facilitating communication for individuals with either partial or profound hearing impairments. The process involves receiving the speech signal in analogue form, followed by various signal processing algorithms to make it compatible with devices of limited capacity, such as cochlear implants (CIs). Unfortunately, these implants, equipped with a finite number of electrodes, often result in speech distortion during synthesis. Despite efforts by researchers to enhance received speech quality using various state-of-the-art signal processing techniques, challenges persist, especially in scenarios involving multiple sources of speech, environmental noise, and other circumstances. The advent of new artificial intelligence (AI) methods has ushered in cutting-edge strategies to address the limitations and difficulties associated with traditional signal processing techniques dedicated to CIs. This review aims to comprehensively review advancements in CI-based ASR and speech enhancement, among other related aspects. The primary objective is to provide a thorough overview of metrics and datasets, exploring the capabilities of AI algorithms in this biomedical field, summarizing and commenting on the best results obtained. Additionally, the review will delve into potential applications and suggest future directions to bridge existing research gaps in this domain.
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ELLEN: Extremely Lightly Supervised Learning For Efficient Named Entity Recognition
Authors:Haris Riaz, Razvan-Gabriel Dumitru, Mihai Surdeanu
In this work, we revisit the problem of semi-supervised named entity recognition (NER) focusing on extremely light supervision, consisting of a lexicon containing only 10 examples per class. We introduce ELLEN, a simple, fully modular, neuro-symbolic method that blends fine-tuned language models with linguistic rules. These rules include insights such as ‘’One Sense Per Discourse’’, using a Masked Language Model as an unsupervised NER, leveraging part-of-speech tags to identify and eliminate unlabeled entities as false negatives, and other intuitions about classifier confidence scores in local and global context. ELLEN achieves very strong performance on the CoNLL-2003 dataset when using the minimal supervision from the lexicon above. It also outperforms most existing (and considerably more complex) semi-supervised NER methods under the same supervision settings commonly used in the literature (i.e., 5% of the training data). Further, we evaluate our CoNLL-2003 model in a zero-shot scenario on WNUT-17 where we find that it outperforms GPT-3.5 and achieves comparable performance to GPT-4. In a zero-shot setting, ELLEN also achieves over 75% of the performance of a strong, fully supervised model trained on gold data. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hriaz17/ELLEN.
PDF Accepted to LREC-COLING 2024
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Speaker Distance Estimation in Enclosures from Single-Channel Audio
Authors:Michael Neri, Archontis Politis, Daniel Krause, Marco Carli, Tuomas Virtanen
Distance estimation from audio plays a crucial role in various applications, such as acoustic scene analysis, sound source localization, and room modeling. Most studies predominantly center on employing a classification approach, where distances are discretized into distinct categories, enabling smoother model training and achieving higher accuracy but imposing restrictions on the precision of the obtained sound source position. Towards this direction, in this paper we propose a novel approach for continuous distance estimation from audio signals using a convolutional recurrent neural network with an attention module. The attention mechanism enables the model to focus on relevant temporal and spectral features, enhancing its ability to capture fine-grained distance-related information. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments using audio recordings in controlled environments with three levels of realism (synthetic room impulse response, measured response with convolved speech, and real recordings) on four datasets (our synthetic dataset, QMULTIMIT, VoiceHome-2, and STARSS23). Experimental results show that the model achieves an absolute error of 0.11 meters in a noiseless synthetic scenario. Moreover, the results showed an absolute error of about 1.30 meters in the hybrid scenario. The algorithm’s performance in the real scenario, where unpredictable environmental factors and noise are prevalent, yields an absolute error of approximately 0.50 meters. For reproducible research purposes we make model, code, and synthetic datasets available at https://github.com/michaelneri/audio-distance-estimation.
PDF Accepted for publication in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
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DANCER: Entity Description Augmented Named Entity Corrector for Automatic Speech Recognition
Authors:Yi-Cheng Wang, Hsin-Wei Wang, Bi-Cheng Yan, Chi-Han Lin, Berlin Chen
End-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E ASR) systems often suffer from mistranscription of domain-specific phrases, such as named entities, sometimes leading to catastrophic failures in downstream tasks. A family of fast and lightweight named entity correction (NEC) models for ASR have recently been proposed, which normally build on phonetic-level edit distance algorithms and have shown impressive NEC performance. However, as the named entity (NE) list grows, the problems of phonetic confusion in the NE list are exacerbated; for example, homophone ambiguities increase substantially. In view of this, we proposed a novel Description Augmented Named entity CorrEctoR (dubbed DANCER), which leverages entity descriptions to provide additional information to facilitate mitigation of phonetic confusion for NEC on ASR transcription. To this end, an efficient entity description augmented masked language model (EDA-MLM) comprised of a dense retrieval model is introduced, enabling MLM to adapt swiftly to domain-specific entities for the NEC task. A series of experiments conducted on the AISHELL-1 and Homophone datasets confirm the effectiveness of our modeling approach. DANCER outperforms a strong baseline, the phonetic edit-distance-based NEC model (PED-NEC), by a character error rate (CER) reduction of about 7% relatively on AISHELL-1 for named entities. More notably, when tested on Homophone that contain named entities of high phonetic confusion, DANCER offers a more pronounced CER reduction of 46% relatively over PED-NEC for named entities.
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Dual-path Mamba: Short and Long-term Bidirectional Selective Structured State Space Models for Speech Separation
Authors:Xilin Jiang, Cong Han, Nima Mesgarani
Transformers have been the most successful architecture for various speech modeling tasks, including speech separation. However, the self-attention mechanism in transformers with quadratic complexity is inefficient in computation and memory. Recent models incorporate new layers and modules along with transformers for better performance but also introduce extra model complexity. In this work, we replace transformers with Mamba, a selective state space model, for speech separation. We propose dual-path Mamba, which models short-term and long-term forward and backward dependency of speech signals using selective state spaces. Our experimental results on the WSJ0-2mix data show that our dual-path Mamba models match or outperform dual-path transformer models Sepformer with only 60% of its parameters, and the QDPN with only 30% of its parameters. Our large model also reaches a new state-of-the-art SI-SNRi of 24.4 dB.
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LV-CTC: Non-autoregressive ASR with CTC and latent variable models
Authors:Yuya Fujita, Shinji Watanabe, Xuankai Chang, Takashi Maekaku
Non-autoregressive (NAR) models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) aim to achieve high accuracy and fast inference by simplifying the autoregressive (AR) generation process of conventional models. Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is one of the key techniques used in NAR ASR models. In this paper, we propose a new model combining CTC and a latent variable model, which is one of the state-of-the-art models in the neural machine translation research field. A new neural network architecture and formulation specialized for ASR application are introduced. In the proposed model, CTC alignment is assumed to be dependent on the latent variables that are expected to capture dependencies between tokens. Experimental results on a 100 hours subset of Librispeech corpus showed the best recognition accuracy among CTC-based NAR models. On the TED-LIUM2 corpus, the best recognition accuracy is achieved including AR E2E models with faster inference speed.
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