Multilingual automatic lyrics transcription (ALT) is a challenging task due to the limited availability of labelled data and the challenges introduced by singing, compared to multilingual automatic speech recognition. Although some multilingual singing datasets have been released recently, English continues to dominate these collections. Multilingual ALT remains underexplored due to the scale of data and annotation quality. In this paper, we aim to create a multilingual ALT system with available datasets. Inspired by architectures that have been proven effective for English ALT, we adapt these techniques to the multilingual scenario by expanding the target vocabulary set. We then evaluate the performance of the multilingual model in comparison to its monolingual counterparts. Additionally, we explore various conditioning methods to incorporate language information into the model. We apply analysis by language and combine it with the language classification performance. Our findings reveal that the multilingual model performs consistently better than the monolingual models trained on the language subsets. Furthermore, we demonstrate that incorporating language information significantly enhances performance.
LyricWhiz: Robust Multilingual Zero-shot Lyrics Transcription by Whispering to ChatGPT
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京智源人工智能研究院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽女王学院）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学电气与计算机工程系）
Background music affects lyrics intelligibility of singing vocals in a music piece. Automatic lyrics alignment and transcription in polyphonic music are challenging tasks because the singing vocals are corrupted by the background music. In this work, we propose to learn music genre-specific characteristics to train polyphonic acoustic models. We first compare several automatic speech recognition pipelines for the application of lyrics transcription. We then present the lyrics alignment and transcription performance of music-informed acoustic models for the best-performing pipeline, and systema…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Lyrics transcription of polyphonic music is challenging not only because the singing vocals are corrupted by the background music, but also because the background music and the singing style vary across music genres, such as pop, metal, and hip hop, which affects lyrics intelligibility of the song in different ways. In this work, we propose to transcribe the lyrics of polyphonic music using a novel genre-conditioned network. The proposed network adopts pre-trained model parameters, and incorporates the genre adapters between layers to capture different genre peculiarities for lyrics-genre pair…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Doremir Music Research AB（Doremir音乐研究公司）
This paper makes several contributions to automatic lyrics transcription (ALT) research. Our main contribution is a novel variant of the Multistreaming Time-Delay Neural Network (MTDNN) architecture, called MSTRE-Net, which processes the temporal information using multiple streams in parallel with varying resolutions keeping the network more compact, and thus with a faster inference and an improved recognition rate than having identical TDNN streams. In addition, two novel preprocessing steps prior to training the acoustic model are proposed. First, we suggest using recordings from both monoph…
Automatic lyric transcription (ALT) is a nascent field of study attracting increasing interest from both the speech and music information retrieval communities, given its significant application potential. However, ALT with audio data alone is a notoriously difficult task due to instrumental accompaniment and musical constraints resulting in degradation of both the phonetic cues and the intelligibility of sung lyrics. To tackle this challenge, we propose the MultiModal Automatic Lyric Transcription system (MM-ALT), together with a new dataset, N20EM, which consists of audio recordings, videos …
Speech recognition is a well developed research field so that the current state of the art systems are being used in many applications in the software industry, yet as by today, there still does not exist such robust system for the recognition of words and sentences from singing voice. This paper proposes a complete pipeline for this task which may commonly be referred as automatic lyrics transcription (ALT). We have trained convolutional time-delay neural networks with self-attention on monophonic karaoke recordings using a sequence classification objective for building the acoustic model. Th…
School of Computing, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学计算学院）
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has progressed significantly in recent years due to the emergence of large-scale datasets and the self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm. However, as its counterpart problem in the singing domain, the development of automatic lyric transcription (ALT) suffers from limited data and degraded intelligibility of sung lyrics. To fill in the performance gap between ALT and ASR, we attempt to exploit the similarities between speech and singing. In this work, we propose a transfer-learning-based ALT solution that takes advantage of these similarities by adapting wav…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
Automatic lyrics transcription (ALT), which can be regarded as automatic speech recognition (ASR) on singing voice, is an interesting and practical topic in academia and industry. ALT has not been well developed mainly due to the dearth of paired singing voice and lyrics datasets for model training. Considering that there is a large amount of ASR training data, a straightforward method is to leverage ASR data to enhance ALT training. However, the improvement is marginal when training the ALT system directly with ASR data, because of the gap between the singing voice and standard speech data wh…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
The current lyrics transcription approaches heavily rely on supervised learning with labeled data, but such data are scarce and manual labeling of singing is expensive. How to benefit from unlabeled data and alleviate limited data problem have not been explored for lyrics transcription. We propose the first semi-supervised lyrics transcription paradigm, Self-Transcriber, by leveraging on unlabeled data using self-training with noisy student augmentation. We attempt to demonstrate the possibility of lyrics transcription with a few amount of labeled data. Self-Transcriber generates pseudo labels…
Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院语言技术研究所）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Automatic phonemic transcription tools are useful for low-resource language documentation. However, due to the lack of training sets, only a tiny fraction of languages have phonemic transcription tools. Fortunately, multilingual acoustic modeling provides a solution given limited audio training data. A more challenging problem is to build phonemic transcribers for languages with zero training data. The difficulty of this task is that phoneme inventories often differ between the training languages and the target language, making it infeasible to recognize unseen phonemes. In this work, we addre…
The present study tackles the problem of automatically discovering spoken keywords from untranscribed audio archives without requiring word-by-word speech transcription by automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. The problem is of practical significance in many applications of speech analytics, including those concerning low-resource languages, and large amount of multilingual and multi-genre data. We propose a two-stage approach, which comprises unsupervised acoustic modeling and decoding, followed by pattern mining in acoustic unit sequences. The whole process starts by deriving and mo…
Lyrics transcription of polyphonic music is challenging because singing vocals are corrupted by the background music. To improve the robustness of lyrics transcription to the background music, we propose a strategy of combining the features that emphasize the singing vocals, i.e. music-removed features that represent singing vocal extracted features, and the features that capture the singing vocals as well as the background music, i.e. music-present features. We show that these two sets of features complement each other, and their combination performs better than when they are used alone, thus…
In this paper, we explore the learning of neural network embeddings for natural images and speech waveforms describing the content of those images. These embeddings are learned directly from the waveforms without the use of linguistic transcriptions or conventional speech recognition technology. While prior work has investigated this setting in the monolingual case using English speech data, this work represents the first effort to apply these techniques to languages beyond English. Using spoken captions collected in English and Hindi, we show that the same model architecture can be successful…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；National Research Council of Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）；CNRS-LACITO（法国国家科学研究中心-语言与文明研究所）
We introduce a new resource, AlloVera, which provides mappings from 218 allophones to phonemes for 14 languages. Phonemes are contrastive phonological units, and allophones are their various concrete realizations, which are predictable from phonological context. While phonemic representations are language specific, phonetic representations (stated in terms of (allo)phones) are much closer to a universal (language-independent) transcription. AlloVera allows the training of speech recognition models that output phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), regardless of t…
Automatic transcription of monophonic/polyphonic music is a challenging task due to the lack of availability of large amounts of transcribed data. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation method that converts natural speech to singing voice based on vocoder based speech synthesizer. This approach, called voice to singing (V2S), performs the voice style conversion by modulating the F0 contour of the natural speech with that of a singing voice. The V2S model based style transfer can generate good quality singing voice thereby enabling the conversion of large corpora of natural speech to sin…
Automatic Speech Recognition for Multilingual Oral History Research
Centre of Sustainability Research, University of Otago（奥塔哥大学可持续发展研究中心）；Te Pūnaha Matatini Centre of Research Excellence for Complex Systems（Te Pūnaha Matatini 复杂系统卓越研究中心）；New Zealand Chinese Association（新西兰华人协会）
Whistle: Data-Efficient Multilingual and Crosslingual Speech Recognition via Weakly Phonetic Supervision
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University（新疆大学计算机科学与技术学院）；China Unicom (Guangdong) Industrial Internet Co., Ltd（中国联通（广东）工业互联网有限公司）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
The idea of combining multiple languages' recordings to train a single automatic speech recognition (ASR) model brings the promise of the emergence of universal speech representation. Recently, a Transformer encoder-decoder model has been shown to leverage multilingual data well in IPA transcriptions of languages presented during training. However, the representations it learned were not successful in zero-shot transfer to unseen languages. Because that model lacks an explicit factorization of the acoustic model (AM) and language model (LM), it is unclear to what degree the performance suffere…
National Key Laboratory of Air Traffic Control Automation System Technology, Sichuan University（四川大学）；Southwest Air Traffic Management Bureau, Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC)（中国民用航空局西南空中交通管理局）；Wisesoft Co., Ltd.（四川川大智胜软件股份有限公司）
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is greatly developed in recent years, which expedites many applications on other fields. For the ASR research, speech corpus is always an essential foundation, especially for the vertical industry, such as Air Traffic Control (ATC). There are some speech corpora for common applications, public or paid. However, for the ATC, it is difficult to collect raw speeches from real systems due to safety issues. More importantly, for a supervised learning task like ASR, annotating the transcription is a more laborious work, which hugely restricts the prospect of ASR ap…
Deep acoustic models represent linguistic information based on massive amounts of data. Unfortunately, for regional languages and dialects such resources are mostly not available. However, deep acoustic models might have learned linguistic information that transfers to low-resource languages. In this study, we evaluate whether this is the case through the task of distinguishing low-resource (Dutch) regional varieties. By extracting embeddings from the hidden layers of various wav2vec 2.0 models (including new models which are pre-trained and/or fine-tuned on Dutch) and using dynamic time warpi…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Doremir Music Research AB（Doremir音乐研究公司）
Recent automatic lyrics transcription (ALT) approaches focus on building stronger acoustic models or in-domain language models, while the pronunciation aspect is seldom touched upon. This paper applies a novel computational analysis on the pronunciation variances in sung utterances and further proposes a new pronunciation model adapted for singing. The singing-adapted model is tested on multiple public datasets via word recognition experiments. It performs better than the standard speech dictionary in all settings reporting the best results on ALT in a capella recordings using n-gram language …
Tohoku University of Community Service and Science（东北公益文科大学）；Kitami Institute of Technology（北见工业大学）；Yokohama National University（横滨国立大学）
In recent years, neural models learned through self-supervised pretraining on large scale multilingual text or speech data have exhibited promising results for underresourced languages, especially when a relatively large amount of data from related language(s) is available. While the technology has a potential for facilitating tasks carried out in language documentation projects, such as speech transcription, pretraining a multilingual model from scratch for every new language would be highly impractical. We investigate the possibility for adapting an existing multilingual wav2vec 2.0 model fo…
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement
X-LANCE Lab, SCS, MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（X-LANCE实验室、SCS、人工智能MoE重点实验室、上海交通大学）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Dept EE, Tsinghua University（清华大学电子工程系）；SII；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Birch AI；Dataocean AI；AISpeech Ltd（AISpeech有限公司）；Seasalt AI Inc（Seasalt AI公司）；SpeechColab
We propose data and knowledge-driven approaches for multilingual training of the automated speech recognition (ASR) system for a target language by pooling speech data from multiple source languages. Exploiting the acoustic similarities between Indian languages, we implement two approaches. In phone/senone mapping, deep neural network (DNN) learns to map senones or phones from one language to the others, and the transcriptions of the source languages are modified such that they can be used along with the target language data to train and fine-tune the target language ASR system. In the other a…
