Bhuvana Ramabhadran
Bhuvana Ramabhadran (IEEE Fellow, 2017, ISCA Fellow 2017) currently leads a team of researchers at Google, focusing on semi-supervised learning for speech recognition and multilingual speech recognition. Previously, she was a Distinguished Research Staff Member and Manager in IBM Research AI, at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA, where she led a team of researchers in the Speech Technologies Group and coordinated activities across IBM’s world wide laboratories in the areas of speech recognition, synthesis, and spoken term detection. She has served as an elected member of the IEEE SPS Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC), for two terms since 2010 and as its elected Vice Chair and Chair (2014–2016) and currently serves as an Advisory Member. She has served as the Area Chair for ICASSP (2011–2018), on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2011–2015), and on the IEEE SPS conference board (2017-2018) during which she also served as the conference board’s liaison with the ICASSP organizing committees , and as Regional Director-At-Large (2018-2020), where she coordinated work across all US IEEE chapters . She currently serves as the Chair of the IEEE Flanagan Speech & Audio Award Committee and currently serves as a Member-at-Large of the IEEE SPS Board of Governors. She serves on the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) board and has served as the area chair for Interspeech conferences since 2012. In addition to organizing several workshops at ICML, HLT-NAACL, NeurIPS and ICML, she has also served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where she co-taught a graduate course on speech recognition. She has served as the (Co/-)Principal Investigator on several projects funded by the National Science Foundation, EU and iARPA, spanning speech recognition, information retrieval from spoken archives, keyword spotting in many languages. She has published over 150 papers and been granted over 40 U.S. patents. Her research interests include speech recognition and synthesis algorithms, statistical modeling, signal processing, and machine learning. Some of her recent work has focused on the use of speech synthesis to improve core speech recognition performance and self-supervised learning.
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Twenty-Five Years of Evolution in Speech and Language Processing
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Michael Picheny
Dilek Hakkani-Tur
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 40 (2023), pp. 27-39
Virtuoso: Massive Multilingual Speech-Text Joint Semi-Supervised Learning for Text-to-Speech
Takaaki Saeki
Zhehuai Chen
Nobuyuki Morioka
Yu Zhang
ICASSP (2023)
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This paper proposes Virtuoso, a massive multilingual speech–text joint learning framework for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) models. Existing multilingual TTS typically supports tens of languages, which are a small fraction of thousands of languages in the world. One difficulty to scale multilingual TTS to hundreds of languages is collecting high-quality speech–text paired data in low-resource languages. This study extends Maestro, which is a speech–text semi-supervised joint pretraining framework for automatic speech recognition (ASR), to speech generation tasks. To train a TTS model from various types of speech and text data, different training schemes are designed to handle supervised (paired TTS and ASR data) and unsupervised (untranscribed speech and unspoken text) datasets. Experimental evaluation shows that 1) multilingual TTS models trained on Virtuoso can achieve significantly better naturalness and intelligibility than baseline TTS models in seen languages, and 2) these models can synthesize reasonably good speech for unseen languages where no paired TTS data is available.
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Hard and soft distillation are two popular approaches for knowledge distillation from a teacher to student ASR model. Despite soft distillation being better than hard distillation, it has several limitations. First, training convergence depends on the match between the teacher and student alignments. Second, soft distillation suffers quality regressions when using teacher and student models with different architectures. Third, in case of non-causal teacher models, soft distillation requires tuning of the shift in teacher alignments to the right. Finally, soft distillation requires both the teacher and student models to have the same temporal sampling rates. In this work, we propose a novel knowledge distillation method for RNN-T models that tackles limitations of both hard and soft distillation approaches. We call our method Full-sum distillation, which simply distills the sequence posterior probability of the teacher model to the student model. Thus, this method does not depend directly on the noisy labels to distill knowledge as well as it does not depend on time dimension. We also propose a variant of Full-sum distillation to distill the sequence discriminative knowledge of the teacher model to the student model to further improve performance. Using full-sum distillation, we achieve significant improvements when training with strong and weak teacher models on public data as well as on in-house production data.
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MAESTRO: Matched Speech Text Representations through Modality Matching
Yu Zhang
Zhehuai Chen
interspeech 2022 (2022) (to appear)
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We present Maestro, a self-supervised training method to
unify representations learnt from speech and text modalities.
Self-supervised learning from speech signals aims to learn the
latent structure inherent in the signal, while self-supervised
learning from text attempts to capture lexical information.
Learning aligned representations from unpaired speech and
text sequences is a challenging task. Previous work either
implicitly enforced the representations learnt from these two
modalities to be aligned in the latent space through multi-
tasking and parameter sharing or explicitly through conversion
of modalities via speech synthesis. While the former suffers
from interference between the two modalities, the latter
introduces additional complexity. In this paper, we propose
Maestro, a novel algorithm to learn unified representations from
both these modalities simultaneously that can transfer to diverse
downstream tasks such as Automated Speech Recognition
(ASR) and Speech Translation (ST). Maestro learns unified
representations through sequence alignment, duration predic-
tion and matching embeddings in the learned space through
an aligned masked-language model loss. We establish a new
state-of-the-art (SOTA) on VoxPopuli multilingual ASR with
a 8% relative reduction in Word Error Rate (WER), multi-
domain SpeechStew ASR (3.7% relative) and 21 languages to
English multilingual ST on CoVoST 2 with an improvement of
2.8 BLEU averaged over 21 languages.
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Maestro-U: Leveraging joint speech-text representation learning for zero supervised speech ASR
Zhehuai Chen
Yu Zhang
IEEE SLT (2022)
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Training state-of-the-art Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) models typically requires a substantial amount of transcribed speech. In this work, we demonstrate that a modality-matched joint speech and text model introduced in~\cite{zhehuai2021} can be leveraged to train a massively multilingual ASR model without any transcribed speech. In most zero resource conditions, lack of transcribed speech also implies lack of lexicons. This paper explores the use of jointly learnt speech and text representations in a massively multilingual, zero transcribed speech, real-world setting to expand the set of languages covered by ASR models with only unlabeled speech and text in the target languages. We define the task to cover $102$ languages, where transcribed speech is available in $52$ of these languages and can be used to improve end-to-end ASR quality on the remaining $50$. First, we show that by combining speech representations with byte-level text representations coupled with the effective use of language embeddings, we can dramatically reduce the resource requirements for deploying an ASR model to a new language. On the FLEURS dataset, this approach is able to reduce the CER on languages with no transcribed speech from 64.1\% to 29.6\%, a relative reduction of 54\%. Second, using a subset of Indic languages we show that the proposed method can learn effectively from languages with transcribed speech even when there is limited to no graphemeic overlap with the target languages, reducing the average CER of the target languages from 56.3 to 17.2. We believe this is the first demonstration that competitive ASR performance can be achieved for an unseen language using no language resources other than text and untranscribed speech.
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Reducing domain mismatch in self-supervised speech pretraining
Yu Zhang
submission to Interspeech 2022 (2022) (to appear)
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Masked speech modeling (MSM) methods such as wav2vec2 or w2v-BERT learn representations over speech frames which are randomly masked within an utterance. While these methods improve performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, they have one major limitation. They treat all unsupervised speech samples with equal weight, which hinders learning as not all samples have relevant information to learn meaningful representations. In this work, we address this limitation. We propose ask2mask (ATM), a novel approach to focus on specific samples during MSM pre-training. ATM employs an external ASR model or scorer to weight unsupervised input samples in two different ways: 1) A fine-grained data selection is performed by masking over the highly confident input frames as
chosen by the scorer. This allows the model to learn meaningful representations. 2) ATM is further extended to focus at utterancelevel by weighting the final MSM loss with the utterancelevel confidence score. We conduct fine-tuning experiments on two well-benchmarked corpora: LibriSpeech (matching the pretraining data) and Commonvoice, TED-LIUM, AMI and CHiME6 (not matching the pre-training data). The results substantiate the efficacy of ATM on significantly improving the recognition
performance under mismatched conditions (up to 11.6% relative over published results and upto 4.46% relative over our internal baseline) while still yielding modest improvements under matched
conditions.
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Second-pass rescoring is a well known technique to improve the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Neural oracle search (NOS), which selects the most likely hypothesis from N-best hypothesis list by integrating in-formation from multiple sources, such as the input acoustic representations, N-best hypotheses, additional first-pass statistics,and unpaired textual information through an external language model, has shown success in re-scoring for RNN-T first-pass models. Multilingual first-pass speech recognition models of-ten outperform their monolingual counterparts when trained on related or low-resource languages. In this paper, we investigate making the second-pass model multilingual and apply rescoring on a multilingual first-pass. We conduct experiments on Nordic languages including Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish.
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Ask2Mask: Guided Data Selection for Masked Speech Modeling
Yu Zhang
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (2022)
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Masked speech modeling (MSM) pre-training methods such as wav2vec2 or w2v-BERT randomly mask speech frames in an utterance and compute losses on the masked instances. While these methods improve performance of Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, they have one major limitation. They generally perform best under matched conditions, i.e., when the data used for pre-training is matched to the data used for fine-tuning. Using out-of-domain (OOD) pre-training data with limited in-domain fine-tuning data from the target domain results in reduced gains. The relative value of in-domain data within a MSM pre-training corpus has not been well-explored in the literature. In this work, we address precisely this limitation. We propose ask2mask, a novel approach to focus on samples relevant to the target domain (in-domain) during pre-training with OOD or any available data. To perform this fine-grained data selection, ATM applies masking only to input frames with high confidence scores obtained from an external classification model. This allows the model to achieve meaningful in-domain representations and simultaneously discard low-confidence frames which could lead to learning erroneous representations. The ATM approach is further extended to focus on utterances with high confidences by scaling the final MSM loss computed for each masked input frame with the utterance-level confidence score. We conduct experiments on two well-benchmarked read speech corpus (Librispeech) and conversational speech corpus (AMI). The results substantiate the efficacy of ATM on significantly improving target domain performance under mismatched conditions while still yielding modest improvements under matched conditions.
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On Weight Interpolation of the Hybrid Autoregressive Transducer Model
Interspeech 2022, Interspeech 2022 (2022) (to appear)
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This paper explores ways to improve a two-pass speech recognition system when the first-pass
is hybrid autoregressive transducer model and the second-pass is a neural language model.
The main focus is on the scores provided by each of these models, their quantitative analysis,
how to improve them and the best way to integrate them with the objective of better recognition
accuracy. Several analysis are presented to show the importance of the choice of the
integration weights for combining the first-pass and the second-pass scores. A sequence level weight
estimation model along with four training criteria are proposed which allow adaptive integration
of the scores per acoustic sequence.
The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated by constructing and analyzing
models on the Librispeech data set.
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Accented Speech Recognition: Benchmarking, Pre-training, and Diverse Data
Zhehuai Chen
Chung-Cheng Chiu
Pavel Golik
Wei Han
Levi King
Suzan Schwartz
(2022)
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Building inclusive speech recognition systems is a crucial step towards developing technologies that speakers of all language varieties can use. Therefore, ASR systems must work for everybody independently of the way they speak. To accomplish this goal, there should be available data sets representing language varieties, and also an understanding of model configuration that is the most helpful in achieving robust understanding of all types of speech. However, there are not enough data sets for accented speech, and for the ones that are already available, more training approaches need to be explored to improve the quality of accented speech recognition. In this paper, we discuss recent progress towards developing more inclusive ASR systems, namely, the importance of building new data sets representing linguistic diversity, and exploring novel training approaches to improve performance for all users. We address recent directions within benchmarking ASR systems for accented speech, measure the effects of wav2vec 2.0 pre-training on accented speech recognition, and highlight corpora relevant for diverse ASR evaluations.
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Mixture Model Attention: Flexible Streaming and Non-Streaming Automatic Speech Recognition
Proceedings of Interspeech, 2021 (to appear)
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Streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) hypothesizes words as soon as the input audio arrives, whereas non-streaming ASR can potentially wait for the completion of the entire utterance to hypothesize words.
Streaming and non-streaming ASR systems have typically used different acoustic encoders.
Recent work has attempted to unify them by either jointly training a fixed stack of streaming and non-streaming layers or using knowledge distillation during training to ensure consistency between the streaming and non-streaming predictions.
We propose mixture model (MiMo) attention as a simpler and theoretically-motivated alternative that replaces only the attention mechanism, requires no change to the training loss, and allows greater flexibility of switching between streaming and non-streaming mode during inference.
Our experiments on the public Librispeech data set and a few Indic language data sets show that MiMo attention endows a single ASR model with the ability to operate in both streaming and non-streaming modes without any overhead and without significant loss in accuracy compared to separately-trained streaming and non-streaming models.
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Regularizing Word Segmentation by Creating Misspellings
Hainan Xu
Jesse Emond
Yinghui Huang
Interspeech 2021 (2021) (to appear)
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This work focuses on improving subword segmentation algorithms for end-to-end speech recognition models, and makes two major contributions. Firstly, we propose a novel word segmentation algorithm. The algorithm uses the same vocabulary file generated by a regular wordpiece model, is easily extensible and supports a variety of regularization techniques in the segmentation space, and outperforms the regular wordpiece model. Secondly, we propose a number of novel regularization methods that introduces randomness into the tokenization algorithm, which bring further gains in speech recognition performance. A noteworthy discovery from this work is that creating artificial misspelling in words results in the best performance among all the methods, which could inspire future research for strategies in this area.
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Extending Parrotron: An End-to-End, Speech Conversion and Speech Recognition Model for Atypical Speech
Rohan Doshi
Youzheng Chen
Liyang Jiang
Xia Zhang
Andrea Chu
ICASSP 2021 - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
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We present an extended Parrotron model: a single, end-to-end model that enables voice conversion and recognition simultaneously. Input spectrograms are transformed to output spectrograms in the voice of a predetermined target speaker while also generating hypotheses in the target vocabulary. We study the performance of this novel architecture that jointly predicts speech and text on atypical (‘dysarthric’) speech. We show that with as little as an hour of atypical speech, speaker adaptation can yield up to 67% relative reduction in Word Error Rate (WER). We also show that data augmentation using a customized synthesizer built on the atypical speech can provide an additional 10% relative improvement over the best speaker-adapted model. Finally, we show that these methods generalize across 8 dysarthria etiologies with a range of severities.
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Self-Adaptive Distillation for Multilingual Speech Recognition: Leveraging Student Independence
Brian Farris
Yun Zhu
Interspeech 2021 (to appear)
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With a large population of the world speaking more than one language, multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) has gained popularity in the recent years. While lower resource languages can benefit from quality improvements in a multilingual ASR system, including unrelated or higher resource languages in the mix often results in performance degradation. In this paper, we propose distilling from multiple teachers, with each language using its best teacher during training, to tackle this problem. We introduce self-adaptive distillation, a novel technique for automatic weighting of the distillation loss that uses the student/teachers confidences. We analyze the effectiveness of the proposed techniques on two real world use-cases and show that the performance of the multilingual ASR models can be improved by up to 11.5% without any increase in model capacity. Furthermore, we show that when our methods are combined with increase in model capacity, we can achieve quality gains of up to 20.7%.
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Semi-Supervision in ASR: Sequential Mixmatch and Factorized TTS-Based Augmentation
Zhehuai Chen
Yu Zhang
Yinghui Huang
Jesse Emond
(2021)
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Semi- and self-supervised training techniques have the potential to improve performance of speech recognition systems without additional transcribed speech data. In this work, we demonstrate the efficacy of two approaches to semi-supervision for automated speech recognition. The two approaches lever-age vast amounts of available unspoken text and untranscribed audio. First, we present factorized multilingual speech synthesis to improve data augmentation on unspoken text. Next, we present an online implementation of Noisy Student Training to incorporate untranscribed audio. We propose a modified Sequential MixMatch algorithm with iterative learning to learn from untranscribed speech. We demonstrate the compatibility of these techniques yielding a relative reduction of word error rate of up to 14.4% on the voice search task.
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Regularization and data augmentation are crucial to training end-to-end automatic speech recognition systems. Dropout is a popular regularization technique, which operates on each neuron independently by multiplying it with a Bernoulli random variable. We propose a generalization of dropout, called ``convolutional dropout'', where each neuron's activation is replaced with a randomly-weighted linear combination of neuron values in its neighborhood. We believe that this formulation combines the regularizing effect of dropout with the smoothing effects of the convolution operation. In addition to convolutional dropout, this paper also proposes using random wordpiece segmentations as a data augmentation scheme during training, inspired by results in neural machine translation. We adopt both these methods during the training of transformer-transducer speech recognition models, and show consistent improvements over strong baselines across different languages.
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Mixture of Informed Experts for Multilingual Speech Recognition
Brian Farris
Yun Zhu
ICASSP 2021, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (to appear)
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Multilingual speech recognition models are capable of recognizing speech in multiple different languages. When trained on related or low-resource languages, these models often outperform their monolingual counterparts. Similar to other forms of multi-task models, when the group of languages are unrelated, or when large amounts of training data is available, multilingual models can suffer from performance loss. We investigate the use of a mixture-of-expert approach to assign per-language parameters in the model to increase network capacity in a structured fashion. We introduce a novel variant of this approach, 'informed experts', which attempts to tackle inter-task conflicts by eliminating gradients from other tasks in the these task-specific parameters. We conduct experiments on a real-world task on English, French and four dialects of Arabic to show the effectiveness of our approach.
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Conformer Parrotron: a Faster and Stronger End-to-end SpeechConversion and Recognition Model for Atypical Speech
Zhehuai Chen
Xia Zhang
Youzheng Chen
Liyang Jiang
Andrea Chu
Rohan Doshi
interspeech 2021 (2021)
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Parrotron is an end-to-end personalizable model that enables many-to-one voice conversion and Automated Speech
Recognition (ASR) simultaneously for atypical speech. In this
work, we present the next-generation Parrotron model with improvements in overall performance and training and inference
speeds. The proposed architecture builds on the recently popularized conformer encoder comprising of convolution and attention layer based blocks used in ASR. We introduce architectural modifications that sub-samples encoder activations to
achieve speed-ups in training and inference. In order to jointly
improve ASR and voice conversion quality, we show that this
requires a corresponding up-sampling in the decoder network.
We provide an in-depth analysis on how the proposed approach
can maximize the efficiency of a speech-to-speech conversion
model in the context of atypical speech. Experiments on both
many-to-one and one-to-one dysarthric speech conversion tasks
show that we can achieve up to 7X speedup and 35% relative reduction in WER over the previous best Transformer-based Parrotron model. We also show that these techniques are general
enough and can provide similar wins on the transformer based
Parrotron model.
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SCADA: Stochastic, Consistent and Adversarial Data Augmentation to Improve ASR
Zhehuai Chen
Yu Zhang
Proceedings of Interspeech 2020, pp. 2832-2836
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Recent developments in data augmentation has brought great gains in improvement for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Parallel developments in augmentation policy search in computer vision domain has shown improvements in model performance and robustness. In addition, recent developments in semi-supervised learning has shown that consistency measures are crucial for performance and robustness. In this work, we demonstrate that combining augmentation policies with consistency measures and model regularization can greatly improve speech recognition performance. Using the Librispeech task, we show: 1) symmetric consistency measures such as the Jensen-Shannon Divergence provide 11\% relative improvements in ASR performance; 2) Augmented adversarial inputs using Virtual Adversarial Noise (VAT) provides 8.9\% relative win; and 3) random sampling from arbitrary combination of augmentation policies yields the best policy. These contributions result in an overall reduction in Word Error Rate (WER) of 18\% relative on the Librispeech task presented in this paper.
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Automated speech recognition (ASR) coverage of the world's languages continues to expand. Yet, as data-demanding neural network models continue to revolutionize the field, it poses a challenge for data-scarce languages. Multilingual models allow for the joint training of data-scarce and data-rich languages enabling data and parameter sharing. One of the main goals of multilingual ASR is to build a single model for all languages while reaping the benefits of sharing on data-scarce languages without impacting performance on the data-rich languages. However, most state-of-the-art multilingual models require the encoding of language information and therefore are not as flexible or scalable when expanding to newer languages. Language independent multilingual models help to address this, as well as, are more suited to multicultural societies such as in India, where languages overlap and are frequently used together by native speakers. In this paper, we propose a new approach to building a language-agnostic multilingual ASR system using transliteration. This training strategy maps all languages to one writing system through a many-to-one transliteration transducer that maps similar sounding acoustics to one target sequences such as, graphemes, phonemes or wordpieces resulting in improved data sharing and reduced phonetic confusions. We propose a training strategy that maps all languages to one writing system through a many-to-one transliteration transducer. We show with four Indic languages, namely, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Kannada, that the resulting multilingual model achieves a performance comparable to a language-dependent multilingual model, with an improvement of up to 15\% relative on the data-scarce language.
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Improving Speech Recognition Using Consistent Predictions on Synthesized Speech
Zhehuai Chen
Yu Zhang
IEEE ICASSP 2020
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Speech synthesis has advanced to the point of being close to indistinguishable from human speech. However, efforts to train speech recognition systems on synthesized utterances have not been able to show that synthesized data can be effectively used to augment or replace human speech.
In this work, we demonstrate that promoting consistent predictions in response to real and synthesized speech enables significantly improved speech recognition performance.
We also find that training on 460 hours of LibriSpeech augmented with 500 hours of transcripts (without audio) performance is within 0.2\% WER of a system trained on 960 hours of transcribed audio. This suggests that with this approach, when there is sufficient text available, reliance on transcribed audio can be cut nearly in half.
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Generating diverse and natural text-to-speech samples using quantized fine-grained VAE and autoregressive prosody prior
Guangzhi Sun
Yu Zhang
ICASSP (2020)
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Recently proposed approaches for fine-grained prosody control of end-to-end text-to-speech samples enable precise control of the prosody of synthesized speech.
Such models incorporate a fine-grained variational autoencoder (VAE) structure into a sequence-to-sequence model, extracting latent prosody features for each input token (e.g.\ phonemes).
Generating samples using the standard VAE prior, an independent Gaussian at each time step, results in very unnatural and discontinuous speech, with dramatic variation between phonemes.
In this paper we propose a sequential prior in the discrete latent space which can be used to generate more natural samples.
This is accomplished by discretizing the latent prosody features using vector quantization, and training an autoregressive (AR) prior model over the result.
The AR prior is learned separately from the training of the posterior.
We evaluate the approach using subjective listening tests, objective metrics of automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance, as well as measurements of prosody attributes including volume, pitch, and phoneme duration.
Compared to the fine-grained VAE baseline, the proposed model achieves equally good copy synthesis reconstruction performance, but significantly improves naturalness in sample generation.
The diversity of the prosody in random samples better matches that of the real speech.
Furthermore, initial experiments demonstrate that samples generated from the quantized latent sapce can be used as an effective data augmentation strategy to improve ASR performance.
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Improving Speech Recognition using GAN-based Speech Synthesis and Contrastive Unspoken Text Selection
Zhehuai Chen
Yu Zhang
Interspeech 2020
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Text-to-Speech synthesis (TTS) based data augmentation is a relatively new mechanism for utilizing text-only data to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) training without parameter or inference architecture changes. However, efforts to train speech recognition systems on synthesized utterances suffer from limited acoustic diversity of TTS outputs. Additionally, the text-only corpus is always much larger than the transcribed speech corpus by several orders of magnitude, which makes speech synthesis of all the text data impractical. In this work, we propose to combine generative adversarial network (GAN) and multi-style training (MTR) to increase acoustic diversity in the synthesized data. We also present a contrastive language model-based data selection technique to improve the efficiency of learning from unspoken text. We demonstrate the ability of our proposed method to enable efficient, large-scale unspoken text learning which achieving a 32.7\% relative WER reduction on a voice-search task.
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Multilingual Speech Recognition with Self-Attention Structured Parameterization
Yun Zhu
Brian Farris
Hainan Xu
Han Lu
Qian Zhang
Interspeech 2020, 21st Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, ISCA
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Multilingual automatic speech recognition systems can transcribe utterances from different languages. These systems are attractive from different perspectives: they can provide quality improvements, specially for lower resource languages, and simplify the training and deployment procedure. End-to-end speech recognition has further simplified multilingual modeling as one model, instead of several components of a classical system, have to be unified. In this paper, we investigate a streamable end-to-end multilingual system based on the Transformer Transducer. We propose several techniques for adapting the self-attention architecture based on the language id. We analyze the trade-offs of each method with regards to quality gains and number of additional parameters introduced. We conduct experiments in a real-world task consisting of five languages. Our experimental results demonstrate $\sim$10\% and $\sim$15\% relative gain over the baseline multilingual model.
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Speech Recognition with Augmented Synthesized Speech
Ye Jia
Yu Zhang
ASRU 2019 (to appear)
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Recent success of the Tacotron speech synthesis architecture and its variants in producing natural sounding multi-speaker synthesized speech has raised the exciting possibility of replacing expensive, manually transcribed, domain-specific, human speech that is used to train speech recognizers. The multi-speaker speech synthesis architecture can learn latent embedding spaces of prosody, speaker and style variations derived from input acoustic representations thereby allowing for manipulation of the synthesized speech. In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of enhancing speech recognition performance using speech synthesis using two corpora from different domains. We explore algorithms to provide the necessary acoustic and lexical diversity needed for robust speech recognition. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of this approach as a data augmentation strategy for domain-transfer.
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Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Recognition with a Streaming End-to-End Model
Interspeech 2019 (2019) (to appear)
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Multilingual end-to-end (E2E) models have shown great
promise as a means to expand coverage of the world’s lan-
guages by automatic speech recognition systems. They im-
prove over monolingual E2E systems, especially on low re-
source languages, and simplify training and serving by elimi-
nating language-specific acoustic, pronunciation, and language
models. This work aims to develop an E2E multilingual system
which is equipped to operate in low-latency interactive applica-
tions as well as handle the challenges of real world imbalanced
data. First, we present a streaming E2E multilingual model.
Second, we compare techniques to deal with imbalance across
languages. We find that a combination of conditioning on a
language vector and training language-specific adapter layers
produces the best model. The resulting E2E multilingual model
system achieves lower word error rate (WER) than state-of-the-
art conventional monolingual models by at least 10% relative
on every language.
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Learning to speak fluently in a foreign language: Multilingual speech synthesis and cross-language voice cloning
Yu Zhang
Ye Jia
Interspeech (2019)
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We present a multispeaker, multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis model based on Tacotron that is able to produce high quality speech in multiple languages. Moreover, the model is able to transfer voices across languages, e.g. synthesize fluent Spanish speech using an English speaker's voice, without training on any bilingual or parallel examples. Such transfer works across distantly related languages, e.g. English and Mandarin.
Critical to achieving this result are: 1. using a phonemic input representation to encourage sharing of model capacity across languages, and 2. incorporating an adversarial loss term to encourage the model to disentangle its representation of speaker identity (which is perfectly correlated with language in the training data) from the speech content. Further scaling up the model by training on multiple speakers of each language, and incorporating an autoencoding input to help stabilize attention during training, results in a model which can be used to consistently synthesize intelligible speech for training speakers in all languages seen during training, and in native or foreign accents.
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Transliteration based approaches to improve code-switched speech recognition performance
Jesse Emond
IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) (2018), pp. 448-455
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Code-switching is a commonly occurring phenomenon in many multilingual communities, wherein a speaker switches between languages within a single utterance. Conventional Word Error Rate (WER) is not sufficient for measuring the performance of code-mixed languages due to ambiguities in transcription, misspellings and borrowing of words from two different writing systems. These rendering errors artificially inflate the WER of an Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) system and complicate its evaluation. Furthermore, these errors make it harder to accurately evaluate modeling errors originating from code-switched language and acoustic models. In this work, we propose the use of a new metric, transliteration-optimized Word Error Rate (toWER) that smoothes out many of these irregularities by mapping all text to one writing system and demonstrate a correlation with the amount of code-switching present in a language. We also present a novel approach to acoustic and language modeling for bilingual code-switched Indic languages using the same transliteration approach to normalize the data for three types of language models, namely, a conventional n-gram language model, a maximum entropy based language model and a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) language model, and a state-of-the-art Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) acoustic model. We demonstrate the robustness of the proposed approach on several Indic languages from Google Voice Search traffic with significant gains in ASR performance up to 10% relative over the state-of-the-art baseline.
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