In this paper, we present a two-stage language identification (LID) system based on a shallow ResNet14 followed by a simple 2-layer recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture, which was used for Xunfei (iFlyTek) Chinese Dialect Recognition Challenge and won the first place among 110 teams. The system trains an acoustic model (AM) firstly with connectionist temporal classification (CTC) to recognize the given phonetic sequence annotation and then train another RNN to classify dialect category by utilizing the intermediate features as inputs from the AM. Compared with a three-stage system we further explore, our results show that the two-stage system can achieve high accuracy for Chinese dialects recognition under both short utterance and long utterance conditions with less training time.
Chinese dialects are different variations of Chinese and can be considered as different languages in the same language family with Mandarin. Though they all use Chinese characters, the pronunciations, grammar and idioms can vary significantly, and even local speakers may find it hard to input correct written forms of dialect. Besides, using Mandarin text as text-to-speech inputs would generate speech with poor naturalness. In this paper, we propose a novel Chinese dialect TTS frontend with a translation module, which converts Mandarin text into dialectic expressions to improve the intelligibil…
DialectS2S: End-to-End Speech Dialogue Modeling for Low-Resource Chinese Dialects
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Wuhan AI Research（武汉人工智能研究院）；GWM AI Lab（长城汽车人工智能实验室）
This paper describes the winning approach in the Shared Task 3 at SwissText 2021 on Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text, a public competition on dialect recognition and translation. Swiss German refers to the multitude of Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland. Swiss German differs significantly from standard German in pronunciation, word inventory and grammar. It is mostly incomprehensible to native German speakers. Moreover, it lacks a standardized written script. To solve the challenging task, we propose a hybrid automatic speech recognition system wit…
Sudan University of Science and Technology（苏丹科技大学）
Designing a natural voice interface rely mostly on Speech recognition for interaction between human and their modern digital life equipment. In addition, speech recognition narrows the gap between monolingual individuals to better exchange communication. However, the field lacks wide support for several universal languages and their dialects, while most of the daily conversations are carried out using them. This paper comes to inspect the viability of designing an Automatic Speech Recognition model for the Sudanese dialect, which is one of the Arabic Language dialects, and its complexity is a …
From Dialect Gaps to Identity Maps: Tackling Variability in Speaker Verification
Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Centre, University of Kurdistan Hewlér（库尔德斯坦赫威勒大学人工智能与创新中心）；Language Center, Charmo University（查尔莫大学语言中心）；Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, Qaiwan International University（凯万国际大学工程与计算机科学学院）；Computer Science Department, Faculty of Science, Soran University（索兰大学理学院计算机科学系）
ANCHOLIK-NER: A Benchmark Dataset for Bangla Regional Named Entity Recognition
Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；Southeast University（东南大学）；Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology（阿沙努尔大学科学与技术学院）；Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉工程与技术大学）
This paper describes the Arabic Multi-Genre Broadcast (MGB-2) Challenge for SLT-2016. Unlike last year's English MGB Challenge, which focused on recognition of diverse TV genres, this year, the challenge has an emphasis on handling the diversity in dialect in Arabic speech. Audio data comes from 19 distinct programmes from the Aljazeera Arabic TV channel between March 2005 and December 2015. Programmes are split into three groups: conversations, interviews, and reports. A total of 1,200 hours have been released with lightly supervised transcriptions for the acoustic modelling. For language mod…
As a special machine translation task, dialect translation has two main characteristics: 1) lack of parallel training corpus; and 2) possessing similar grammar between two sides of the translation. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit the commonality and diversity between dialects thus to build unsupervised translation models merely accessing to monolingual data. Specifically, we leverage pivot-private embedding, layer coordination, as well as parameter sharing to sufficiently model commonality and diversity among source and target, ranging from lexical, through syntactic, to semantic …
Identifying the named entities mentioned in text would enrich many semantic applications at the downstream level. However, due to the predominant usage of colloquial language in microblogs, the named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese microblogs experience significant performance deterioration, compared with performing NER in formal Chinese corpus. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective neural framework to derive the character-level embeddings for NER in Chinese text, named ME-CNER. A character embedding is derived with rich semantic information harnessed at multiple granularities, …
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
This paper describes the Arabic MGB-3 Challenge - Arabic Speech Recognition in the Wild. Unlike last year's Arabic MGB-2 Challenge, for which the recognition task was based on more than 1,200 hours broadcast TV news recordings from Aljazeera Arabic TV programs, MGB-3 emphasises dialectal Arabic using a multi-genre collection of Egyptian YouTube videos. Seven genres were used for the data collection: comedy, cooking, family/kids, fashion, drama, sports, and science (TEDx). A total of 16 hours of videos, split evenly across the different genres, were divided into adaptation, development and eval…
In this paper, we introduce the NER dataset from CLUE organization (CLUENER2020), a well-defined fine-grained dataset for named entity recognition in Chinese. CLUENER2020 contains 10 categories. Apart from common labels like person, organization, and location, it contains more diverse categories. It is more challenging than current other Chinese NER datasets and could better reflect real-world applications. For comparison, we implement several state-of-the-art baselines as sequence labeling tasks and report human performance, as well as its analysis. To facilitate future work on fine-grained N…
Harvard Business School（哈佛商学院）；AI Strike（AI Strike公司）
Named entity recognition is a challenging task in Natural Language Processing, especially for informal and noisy social media text. Chinese word boundaries are also entity boundaries, therefore, named entity recognition for Chinese text can benefit from word boundary detection, outputted by Chinese word segmentation. Yet Chinese word segmentation poses its own difficulty because it is influenced by several factors, e.g., segmentation criteria, employed algorithm, etc. Dealt improperly, it may generate a cascading failure to the quality of named entity recognition followed. In this paper we int…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Chinese named entity recognition (CNER) is an important task in Chinese natural language processing field. However, CNER is very challenging since Chinese entity names are highly context-dependent. In addition, Chinese texts lack delimiters to separate words, making it difficult to identify the boundary of entities. Besides, the training data for CNER in many domains is usually insufficient, and annotating enough training data for CNER is very expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a neural approach for CNER. First, we introduce a CNN-LSTM-CRF neural architecture to capture bo…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Tiangong Institute for Intelligent Computing, Tsinghua University（清华大学天工智能计算研究院）；Sogou Inc.（搜狗公司）
End-to-end approaches have drawn much attention recently for significantly simplifying the construction of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. RNN transducer (RNN-T) is one of the popular end-to-end methods. Previous studies have shown that RNN-T is difficult to train and a very complex training process is needed for a reasonable performance. In this paper, we explore RNN-T for a Chinese large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) task and aim to simplify the training process while maintaining performance. First, a new strategy of learning rate decay is proposed to acceler…
End-To-End speech recognition have become increasingly popular in mandarin speech recognition and achieved delightful performance. Mandarin is a tonal language which is different from English and requires special treatment for the acoustic modeling units. There have been several different kinds of modeling units for mandarin such as phoneme, syllable and Chinese character. In this work, we explore two major end-to-end models: connectionist temporal classification (CTC) model and attention based encoder-decoder model for mandarin speech recognition. We compare the performance of three different…
E.SUN Financial Holding Co., Ltd.（玉山金融控股股份有限公司）；National Kaohsiung Normal University（国立高雄师范大学）
Due to the recent advances of natural language processing, several works have applied the pre-trained masked language model (MLM) of BERT to the post-correction of speech recognition. However, existing pre-trained models only consider the semantic correction while the phonetic features of words is neglected. The semantic-only post-correction will consequently decrease the performance since homophonic errors are fairly common in Chinese ASR. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to collectively exploit the contextualized representation and the phonetic information between the error and it…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Recognition Technologies, Inc.（识别技术公司）
Two new approaches to accent classification and conversion are presented and explored, respectively. The first topic is Chinese accent classification/recognition. The second topic is the use of encoder-decoder models for end-to-end Chinese accent conversion, where the classifier in the first topic is used for the training of the accent converter encoder-decoder model. Experiments using different features and model are performed for accent recognition. These features include MFCCs and spectrograms. The classifier models were TDNN and 1D-CNN. On the MAGICDATA dataset with 5 classes of accents, t…
School of Information Science and Technology, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies（广东外语外贸大学信息科学与技术学院）
Chinese NER is a challenging task. As pictographs, Chinese characters contain latent glyph information, which is often overlooked. In this paper, we propose the FGN, Fusion Glyph Network for Chinese NER. Except for adding glyph information, this method may also add extra interactive information with the fusion mechanism. The major innovations of FGN include: (1) a novel CNN structure called CGS-CNN is proposed to capture both glyph information and interactive information between glyphs from neighboring characters. (2) we provide a method with sliding window and Slice-Attention to fuse the BERT…
Turku Centre for Computer Science – TUCS（图尔库计算机科学中心）；Åbo Akademi University（奥博学术大学）；Goethe University（歌德大学）
We introduce an attention-based Bi-LSTM for Chinese implicit discourse relations and demonstrate that modeling argument pairs as a joint sequence can outperform word order-agnostic approaches. Our model benefits from a partial sampling scheme and is conceptually simple, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Chinese Discourse Treebank. We also visualize its attention activity to illustrate the model's ability to selectively focus on the relevant parts of an input sequence.
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；SpeechOcean（海天瑞声）
We present the OC16-CE80 Chinese-English mixlingual speech database which was released as a main resource for training, development and test for the Chinese-English mixlingual speech recognition (MixASR-CHEN) challenge on O-COCOSDA 2016. This database consists of 80 hours of speech signals recorded from more than 1,400 speakers, where the utterances are in Chinese but each involves one or several English words. Based on the database and another two free data resources (THCHS30 and the CMU dictionary), a speech recognition (ASR) baseline was constructed with the deep neural network-hidden Marko…
Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction for Chinese literature text is regarded as the highly difficult problem, partially because of the lack of tagging sets. In this paper, we build a discourse-level dataset from hundreds of Chinese literature articles for improving this task. To build a high quality dataset, we propose two tagging methods to solve the problem of data inconsistency, including a heuristic tagging method and a machine auxiliary tagging method. Based on this corpus, we also introduce several widely used models to conduct experiments. Experimental results not only show …
Recently, researchers set an ambitious goal of conducting speaker recognition in unconstrained conditions where the variations on ambient, channel and emotion could be arbitrary. However, most publicly available datasets are collected under constrained environments, i.e., with little noise and limited channel variation. These datasets tend to deliver over optimistic performance and do not meet the request of research on speaker recognition in unconstrained conditions. In this paper, we present CN-Celeb, a large-scale speaker recognition dataset collected `in the wild'. This dataset contains mo…
Overcoming Data Scarcity in Multi-Dialectal Arabic ASR via Whisper Fine-Tuning
Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Nephrology（内科学部，肾病科）；Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science（伯努利数学、计算机科学研究所）；Speech Technology Lab, Campus Fryslân（语音技术实验室，弗里西恩校区）
Jiangnan University（江南大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Recently, word enhancement has become very popular for Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER), reducing segmentation errors and increasing the semantic and boundary information of Chinese words. However, these methods tend to ignore the information of the Chinese character structure after integrating the lexical information. Chinese characters have evolved from pictographs since ancient times, and their structure often reflects more information about the characters. This paper presents a novel Multi-metadata Embedding based Cross-Transformer (MECT) to improve the performance of Chinese NER by …
In this paper, we present Chinese lexical fusion recognition, a new task which could be regarded as one kind of coreference recognition. First, we introduce the task in detail, showing the relationship with coreference recognition and differences from the existing tasks. Second, we propose an end-to-end joint model for the task, which exploits the state-of-the-art BERT representations as encoder, and is further enhanced with the sememe knowledge from HowNet by graph attention networks. We manually annotate a benchmark dataset for the task and then conduct experiments on it. Results demonstrate…
Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；INSEA（国家统计与应用经济学院）；Ain Shams Univ.（艾因夏姆斯大学）；Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen（中黑森应用技术大学）；UM6P（穆罕默德六世大学）；ESI（国家工程学校）；Université de Nouakchott（努瓦克肖特大学）；Birzeit University（比尔宰特大学）；JUST（约旦科技大学）；TEK-UP；Cairo University（开罗大学）；Invertible AI（可逆人工智能公司）
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）
Most Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems use additional features like part-of-speech (POS) tags, shallow parsing, gazetteers, etc. Such kind of information requires external knowledge like unlabeled texts and trained taggers. Adding these features to NER systems have been shown to have a positive impact. However, sometimes creating gazetteers or taggers can take a lot of time and may require extensive data cleaning. In this paper for Chinese NER systems, we do not use these traditional features but we use lexicographic features of Chinese characters. Chinese characters are composed of graph…
Almieyar: A Culturally Grounded Benchmark for Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Recognition
QCRI, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；UDST（多哈科技大学）；Algo AI；UCL（伦敦大学学院）；University of Tripoli（的黎波里大学）；AUC（开罗美国大学）；KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；CMU-Q（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）；KFUPM（法赫德国王石油与矿产大学）；Alfaisal University（费萨尔大学）；Damascus University（大马士革大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；ENSIAS, Mohammed V University（穆罕默德五世大学国家计算机科学与系统分析学院）；Sultan Qaboos University（苏丹卡布斯大学）；DFKI（德国人工智能研究中心）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；USTHB（阿尔及尔科技大学）
Nankai University（南开大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese is essential but difficult because of the lack of natural delimiters. Therefore, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is usually considered as the first step for Chinese NER. However, models based on word-level embeddings and lexicon features often suffer from segmentation errors and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we investigate a Convolutional Attention Network called CAN for Chinese NER, which consists of a character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) with local-attention layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with global self-attenti…
Speech Translation has always been about giving source text or audio input and waiting for system to give translated output in desired form. In this paper, we present the Acoustic Dialect Decoder (ADD) - a voice to voice ear-piece translation device. We introduce and survey the recent advances made in the field of Speech Engineering, to employ in the ADD, particularly focusing on the three major processing steps of Recognition, Translation and Synthesis. We tackle the problem of machine understanding of natural language by designing a recognition unit for source audio to text, a translation un…
Zhejiang Informatization Development Institute, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学浙江信息化发展研究院）
We propose a new Named entity recognition (NER) method to effectively make use of the results of Part-of-speech (POS) tagging, Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and parsing while avoiding NER error caused by POS tagging error. This paper first uses Stanford natural language process (NLP) tool to annotate large-scale untagged data so as to reduce the dependence on the tagged data; then a new NLP model, g-BERT model, is designed to compress Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model in order to reduce calculation quantity; finally, the model is evaluated based on Chinese …
Chinese Essay Rhetoric Recognition Using LoRA, In-context Learning and Model Ensemble
The Open University of China（中国开放大学）；Engineering Research Center of Integration and Application of Digital Learning Technology, Ministry of Education（教育部数字学习技术整合与应用工程研究中心）
We focus on named entity recognition (NER) for Chinese social media. With massive unlabeled text and quite limited labelled corpus, we propose a semi-supervised learning model based on B-LSTM neural network. To take advantage of traditional methods in NER such as CRF, we combine transition probability with deep learning in our model. To bridge the gap between label accuracy and F-score of NER, we construct a model which can be directly trained on F-score. When considering the instability of F-score driven method and meaningful information provided by label accuracy, we propose an integrated me…
