arXiv subjects

Yao Qian

Publications and source records attributed to Yao Qian.

43 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

UniSpeech-SAT: Universal Speech Representation Learning with Speaker Aware Pre-Training

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a long-standing goal for speech processing, since it utilizes large-scale unlabeled data and avoids extensive human labeling. Recent years witness great successes in applying self-supervised learning in speech recognition, while limited exploration was attempted in applying SSL for modeling speaker characteristics. In this paper, we aim to improve the existing SSL framework for speaker representation learning. Two methods are introduced for enhancing the unsupervised speaker information extraction. First, we apply the multi-task learning to the current SSL framework, where we integrate the utterance-wise contrastive loss with the SSL objective function. Second, for better speaker discrimination, we propose an utterance mixing strategy for data augmentation, where additional overlapped utterances are created unsupervisely and incorporate during training. We integrate the proposed methods into the HuBERT framework. Experiment results on SUPERB benchmark show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance in universal representation learning, especially for speaker identification oriented tasks. An ablation study is performed verifying the efficacy of each proposed method. Finally, we scale up training dataset to 94 thousand hours public audio data and achieve further performance improvement in all SUPERB tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

UniSpeech at scale: An Empirical Study of Pre-training Method on Large-Scale Speech Recognition Dataset

Recently, there has been a vast interest in self-supervised learning (SSL) where the model is pre-trained on large scale unlabeled data and then fine-tuned on a small labeled dataset. The common wisdom is that SSL helps resource-limited tasks in which only a limited amount of labeled data is available. The benefit of SSL keeps diminishing when the labeled training data amount increases. To our best knowledge, at most a few thousand hours of labeled data was used in the study of SSL. In contrast, the industry usually uses tens of thousands of hours of labeled data to build high-accuracy speech recognition (ASR) systems for resource-rich languages. In this study, we take the challenge to investigate whether and how SSL can improve the ASR accuracy of a state-of-the-art production-scale Transformer-Transducer model, which was built with 65 thousand hours of anonymized labeled EN-US data.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2021

UniSpeech: Unified Speech Representation Learning with Labeled and Unlabeled Data

In this paper, we propose a unified pre-training approach called UniSpeech to learn speech representations with both unlabeled and labeled data, in which supervised phonetic CTC learning and phonetically-aware contrastive self-supervised learning are conducted in a multi-task learning manner. The resultant representations can capture information more correlated with phonetic structures and improve the generalization across languages and domains. We evaluate the effectiveness of UniSpeech for cross-lingual representation learning on public CommonVoice corpus. The results show that UniSpeech outperforms self-supervised pretraining and supervised transfer learning for speech recognition by a maximum of 13.4% and 17.8% relative phone error rate reductions respectively (averaged over all testing languages). The transferability of UniSpeech is also demonstrated on a domain-shift speech recognition task, i.e., a relative word error rate reduction of 6% against the previous approach.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Speech-language Pre-training for End-to-end Spoken Language Understanding

End-to-end (E2E) spoken language understanding (SLU) can infer semantics directly from speech signal without cascading an automatic speech recognizer (ASR) with a natural language understanding (NLU) module. However, paired utterance recordings and corresponding semantics may not always be available or sufficient to train an E2E SLU model in a real production environment. In this paper, we propose to unify a well-optimized E2E ASR encoder (speech) and a pre-trained language model encoder (language) into a transformer decoder. The unified speech-language pre-trained model (SLP) is continually enhanced on limited labeled data from a target domain by using a conditional masked language model (MLM) objective, and thus can effectively generate a sequence of intent, slot type, and slot value for given input speech in the inference. The experimental results on two public corpora show that our approach to E2E SLU is superior to the conventional cascaded method. It also outperforms the present state-of-the-art approaches to E2E SLU with much less paired data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

To Trust, or Not to Trust? A Study of Human Bias in Automated Video Interview Assessments

Supervised systems require human labels for training. But, are humans themselves always impartial during the annotation process? We examine this question in the context of automated assessment of human behavioral tasks. Specifically, we investigate whether human ratings themselves can be trusted at their face value when scoring video-based structured interviews, and whether such ratings can impact machine learning models that use them as training data. We present preliminary empirical evidence that indicates there might be biases in such annotations, most of which are visual in nature.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2015

A Unified Tagging Solution: Bidirectional LSTM Recurrent Neural Network with Word Embedding

Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (BLSTM-RNN) has been shown to be very effective for modeling and predicting sequential data, e.g. speech utterances or handwritten documents. In this study, we propose to use BLSTM-RNN for a unified tagging solution that can be applied to various tagging tasks including part-of-speech tagging, chunking and named entity recognition. Instead of exploiting specific features carefully optimized for each task, our solution only uses one set of task-independent features and internal representations learnt from unlabeled text for all tasks.Requiring no task specific knowledge or sophisticated feature engineering, our approach gets nearly state-of-the-art performance in all these three tagging tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2015

Part-of-Speech Tagging with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network

Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (BLSTM-RNN) has been shown to be very effective for tagging sequential data, e.g. speech utterances or handwritten documents. While word embedding has been demoed as a powerful representation for characterizing the statistical properties of natural language. In this study, we propose to use BLSTM-RNN with word embedding for part-of-speech (POS) tagging task. When tested on Penn Treebank WSJ test set, a state-of-the-art performance of 97.40 tagging accuracy is achieved. Without using morphological features, this approach can also achieve a good performance comparable with the Stanford POS tagger.

cs.CL↗