Pre-trained language models have achieved huge improvement on many NLP tasks. However, these methods are usually designed for written text, so they do not consider the properties of spoken language. Therefore, this paper aims at generalizing the idea of language model pre-training to lattices generated by recognition systems. We propose a framework that trains neural lattice language models to provide contextualized representations for spoken language understanding tasks. The proposed two-stage pre-training approach reduces the demands of speech data and has better efficiency. Experiments on intent detection and dialogue act recognition datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms strong baselines when evaluated on spoken inputs. The code is available at https://github.com/MiuLab/Lattice-ELMo.
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a key component of goal oriented dialogue systems that would parse user utterances into semantic frame representations. Traditionally SLU does not utilize the dialogue history beyond the previous system turn and contextual ambiguities are resolved by the downstream components. In this paper, we explore novel approaches for modeling dialogue context in a recurrent neural network (RNN) based language understanding system. We propose the Sequential Dialogue Encoder Network, that allows encoding context from the dialogue history in chronological order. We com…
Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）；EHESS（社会科学高等学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）
We introduce a new unsupervised task, spoken language modeling: the learning of linguistic representations from raw audio signals without any labels, along with the Zero Resource Speech Benchmark 2021: a suite of 4 black-box, zero-shot metrics probing for the quality of the learned models at 4 linguistic levels: phonetics, lexicon, syntax and semantics. We present the results and analyses of a composite baseline made of the concatenation of three unsupervised systems: self-supervised contrastive representation learning (CPC), clustering (k-means) and language modeling (LSTM or BERT). The langu…
This survey provides an overview of the evolution of visually grounded models of spoken language over the last 20 years. Such models are inspired by the observation that when children pick up a language, they rely on a wide range of indirect and noisy clues, crucially including signals from the visual modality co-occurring with spoken utterances. Several fields have made important contributions to this approach to modeling or mimicking the process of learning language: Machine Learning, Natural Language and Speech Processing, Computer Vision and Cognitive Science. The current paper brings toge…
TASTE: Text-Aligned Speech Tokenization and Embedding for Spoken Language Modeling
MediaTek Research（联发科技研究）；Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学通信工程研究所）；Artificial Intelligence Center of Research Excellence, National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学卓越人工智能研究中心）
On the Fallacy of Global Token Perplexity in Spoken Language Model Evaluation
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）；Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Lattices are compact representations that encode multiple hypotheses, such as speech recognition results or different word segmentations. It is shown that encoding lattices as opposed to 1-best results generated by automatic speech recognizer (ASR) boosts the performance of spoken language understanding (SLU). Recently, pretrained language models with the transformer architecture have achieved the state-of-the-art results on natural language understanding, but their ability of encoding lattices has not been explored. Therefore, this paper aims at adapting pretrained transformers to lattice inp…
Recent work in spoken language modeling shows the possibility of learning a language unsupervisedly from raw audio without any text labels. The approach relies first on transforming the audio into a sequence of discrete units (or pseudo-text) and then training a language model directly on such pseudo-text. Is such a discrete bottleneck necessary, potentially introducing irreversible errors in the encoding of the speech signal, or could we learn a language model without discrete units at all? In this work, we study the role of discrete versus continuous representations in spoken language modeli…
Paralinguistics-Aware Speech-Empowered Large Language Models for Natural Conversation
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；NAVER Cloud（NAVER云）；Artificial Intelligence Institute, Seoul National University（首尔大学人工智能研究院）；NAVER AI Lab（NAVER人工智能实验室）
Meta AI Research（元人工智能研究院）；EHESS（法国高等社会科学研究院）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）
We introduce dGSLM, the first "textless" model able to generate audio samples of naturalistic spoken dialogues. It uses recent work on unsupervised spoken unit discovery coupled with a dual-tower transformer architecture with cross-attention trained on 2000 hours of two-channel raw conversational audio (Fisher dataset) without any text or labels. We show that our model is able to generate speech, laughter and other paralinguistic signals in the two channels simultaneously and reproduces more naturalistic and fluid turn-taking compared to a text-based cascaded model.
Augmentation Invariant Discrete Representation for Generative Spoken Language Modeling
Meta AI Research（Meta人工智能研究院）；ENS（巴黎高等师范学院）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；UPEC（巴黎东克雷泰伊大学）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；The Hebrew University of Jerusalem（耶路撒冷希伯来大学）
Task-oriented dialogue systems have been plagued by the difficulties of obtaining large-scale and high-quality annotated conversations. Furthermore, most of the publicly available datasets only include written conversations, which are insufficient to reflect actual human behaviors in practical spoken dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose Task-oriented Dialogue Data Augmentation (TOD-DA), a novel model-agnostic data augmentation paradigm to boost the robustness of task-oriented dialogue modeling on spoken conversations. The TOD-DA consists of two modules: 1) Dialogue Enrichment to expand …
Headline generation for spoken content is important since spoken content is difficult to be shown on the screen and browsed by the user. It is a special type of abstractive summarization, for which the summaries are generated word by word from scratch without using any part of the original content. Many deep learning approaches for headline generation from text document have been proposed recently, all requiring huge quantities of training data, which is difficult for spoken document summarization. In this paper, we propose an ASR error modeling approach to learn the underlying structure of AS…
Speech pre-training has primarily demonstrated efficacy on classification tasks, while its capability of generating novel speech, similar to how GPT-2 can generate coherent paragraphs, has barely been explored. Generative Spoken Language Modeling (GSLM) \cite{Lakhotia2021} is the only prior work addressing the generative aspects of speech pre-training, which replaces text with discovered phone-like units for language modeling and shows the ability to generate meaningful novel sentences. Unfortunately, despite eliminating the need of text, the units used in GSLM discard most of the prosodic inf…
Building robust and general dialogue models for spoken conversations is challenging due to the gap in distributions of spoken and written data. This paper presents our approach to build generalized models for the Knowledge-grounded Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations Challenge of DSTC-10. In order to mitigate the discrepancies between spoken and written text, we mainly employ extensive data augmentation strategies on written data, including artificial error injection and round-trip text-speech transformation. To train robust models for spoken conversations, we improve pre-t…
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China（计算机科学与工程学院，东北大学，沈阳，中国）；NiuTrans Research（NiuTrans研究）；Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学）
Graphemes of most languages encode pronunciation, though some are more explicit than others. Languages like Spanish have a straightforward mapping between its graphemes and phonemes, while this mapping is more convoluted for languages like English. Spoken languages such as Cantonese present even more challenges in pronunciation modeling: (1) they do not have a standard written form, (2) the closest graphemic origins are logographic Han characters, of which only a subset of these logographic characters implicitly encodes pronunciation. In this work, we propose a multimodal approach to predict t…
Speaker intent detection and semantic slot filling are two critical tasks in spoken language understanding (SLU) for dialogue systems. In this paper, we describe a recurrent neural network (RNN) model that jointly performs intent detection, slot filling, and language modeling. The neural network model keeps updating the intent estimation as word in the transcribed utterance arrives and uses it as contextual features in the joint model. Evaluation of the language model and online SLU model is made on the ATIS benchmarking data set. On language modeling task, our joint model achieves 11.8% relat…
We present a token-level decision summarization framework that utilizes the latent topic structures of utterances to identify "summary-worthy" words. Concretely, a series of unsupervised topic models is explored and experimental results show that fine-grained topic models, which discover topics at the utterance-level rather than the document-level, can better identify the gist of the decision-making process. Moreover, our proposed token-level summarization approach, which is able to remove redundancies within utterances, outperforms existing utterance ranking based summarization methods. Final…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Indiana University Bloomington（印第安纳大学伯明顿分校）
In a customer service system, dialogue summarization can boost service efficiency by automatically creating summaries for long spoken dialogues in which customers and agents try to address issues about specific topics. In this work, we focus on topic-oriented dialogue summarization, which generates highly abstractive summaries that preserve the main ideas from dialogues. In spoken dialogues, abundant dialogue noise and common semantics could obscure the underlying informative content, making the general topic modeling approaches difficult to apply. In addition, for customer service, role-speci…
Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)（浦项科技大学）
We propose two methods to capture relevant history information in a multi-turn dialogue by modeling inter-speaker relationship for spoken language understanding (SLU). Our methods are tailored for and therefore compatible with XLNet, which is a state-of-the-art pretrained model, so we verified our models built on the top of XLNet. In our experiments, all models achieved higher accuracy than state-of-the-art contextual SLU models on two benchmark datasets. Analysis on the results demonstrated that the proposed methods are effective to improve SLU accuracy of XLNet. These methods to identify imp…
EHESS（法国社会科学高等研究院）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；FAIR（Facebook AI Research）；Facebook AI Research
We introduce Generative Spoken Language Modeling, the task of learning the acoustic and linguistic characteristics of a language from raw audio (no text, no labels), and a set of metrics to automatically evaluate the learned representations at acoustic and linguistic levels for both encoding and generation. We set up baseline systems consisting of a discrete speech encoder (returning pseudo-text units), a generative language model (trained on pseudo-text), and a speech decoder (generating a waveform from pseudo-text) all trained without supervision and validate the proposed metrics with human …
NTT Media Intelligence Laboratories, NTT Corporation（日本电信电话株式会社媒体智能研究所）
In this paper, we propose a novel spoken-text-style conversion method that can simultaneously execute multiple style conversion modules such as punctuation restoration and disfluency deletion without preparing matched datasets. In practice, transcriptions generated by automatic speech recognition systems are not highly readable because they often include many disfluencies and do not include punctuation marks. To improve their readability, multiple spoken-text-style conversion modules that individually model a single conversion task are cascaded because matched datasets that simultaneously hand…
Prosodic cues in conversational speech aid listeners in discerning a message. We investigate whether acoustic cues in spoken dialogue can be used to identify the importance of individual words to the meaning of a conversation turn. Individuals who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing often rely on real-time captions in live meetings. Word error rate, a traditional metric for evaluating automatic speech recognition, fails to capture that some words are more important for a system to transcribe correctly than others. We present and evaluate neural architectures that use acoustic features for 3-class wor…
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology（台湾科技大学）
Recent developments in deep learning have led to a significant innovation in various classic and practical subjects, including speech recognition, computer vision, question answering, information retrieval and so on. In the context of natural language processing (NLP), language representations have shown giant successes in many downstream tasks, so the school of studies have become a major stream of research recently. Because the immenseness of multimedia data along with speech have spread around the world in our daily life, spoken document retrieval (SDR) has become an important research subj…
Empathy, as defined in behavioral sciences, expresses the ability of human beings to recognize, understand and react to emotions, attitudes and beliefs of others. The lack of an operational definition of empathy makes it difficult to measure it. In this paper, we address two related problems in automatic affective behavior analysis: the design of the annotation protocol and the automatic recognition of empathy from spoken conversations. We propose and evaluate an annotation scheme for empathy inspired by the modal model of emotions. The annotation scheme was evaluated on a corpus of real-life,…
Language model pre-training has shown promising results in various downstream tasks. In this context, we introduce a cross-modal pre-trained language model, called Speech-Text BERT (ST-BERT), to tackle end-to-end spoken language understanding (E2E SLU) tasks. Taking phoneme posterior and subword-level text as an input, ST-BERT learns a contextualized cross-modal alignment via our two proposed pre-training tasks: Cross-modal Masked Language Modeling (CM-MLM) and Cross-modal Conditioned Language Modeling (CM-CLM). Experimental results on three benchmarks present that our approach is effective fo…
Most prior work in dialogue modeling has been on written conversations mostly because of existing data sets. However, written dialogues are not sufficient to fully capture the nature of spoken conversations as well as the potential speech recognition errors in practical spoken dialogue systems. This work presents a new benchmark on spoken task-oriented conversations, which is intended to study multi-domain dialogue state tracking and knowledge-grounded dialogue modeling. We report that the existing state-of-the-art models trained on written conversations are not performing well on our spoken d…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；École Normale Supérieure（巴黎高等师范学院）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales（巴黎高等社会科学研究学院）；Meta AI
Recent progress in self-supervised or unsupervised machine learning has opened the possibility of building a full speech processing system from raw audio without using any textual representations or expert labels such as phonemes, dictionaries or parse trees. The contribution of the Zero Resource Speech Challenge series since 2015 has been to break down this long-term objective into four well-defined tasks -- Acoustic Unit Discovery, Spoken Term Discovery, Discrete Resynthesis, and Spoken Language Modeling -- and introduce associated metrics and benchmarks enabling model comparison and cumulat…
To understand a speaker's turn of a conversation, one needs to segment it into intonational phrases, clean up any speech repairs that might have occurred, and identify discourse markers. In this paper, we argue that these problems must be resolved together, and that they must be resolved early in the processing stream. We put forward a statistical language model that resolves these problems, does POS tagging, and can be used as the language model of a speech recognizer. We find that by accounting for the interactions between these tasks that the performance on each task improves, as does POS t…
