Multimedia or spoken content presents more attractive information than plain text content, but it's more difficult to display on a screen and be selected by a user. As a result, accessing large collections of the former is much more difficult and time-consuming than the latter for humans. It's highly attractive to develop a machine which can automatically understand spoken content and summarize the key information for humans to browse over. In this endeavor, we propose a new task of machine comprehension of spoken content. We define the initial goal as the listening comprehension test of TOEFL, a challenging academic English examination for English learners whose native language is not English. We further propose an Attention-based Multi-hop Recurrent Neural Network (AMRNN) architecture for this task, achieving encouraging results in the initial tests. Initial results also have shown that word-level attention is probably more robust than sentence-level attention for this task with ASR errors.
What Do Humans Hear When Interacting? Experiments on Selective Listening for Evaluating ASR of Spoken Dialogue Systems
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良科学技术研究所）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）；Japan National Institute of Informatics（日本信息处理学会）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京技术大学）
Bootstrapping meaning through listening: Unsupervised learning of spoken sentence embeddings
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor（密歇根大学安娜堡分校）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Indiana University Bloomington（印第安纳大学伯明顿分校）；Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学）；Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences（马克斯·普朗克人类认知与脑科学研究所）
Supervised and Unsupervised Transfer Learning for Question Answering
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University（台湾大学电机工程学系）
Fleurs-SLU: A Massively Multilingual Benchmark for Spoken Language Understanding
Center For Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Würzburg（人工智能与数据科学中心，乌尔姆大学）；Language Technology Lab, University of Cambridge（语言技术实验室，剑桥大学）；Mila, McGill University and Canada CIFAR AI Chair（Mila，麦吉尔大学及加拿大CIFAR人工智能主席）
