English

Improving Device Directedness Classification of Utterances with Semantic Lexical Features

Audio and Speech Processing 2020-10-06 v1 Computation and Language Machine Learning Sound

Abstract

User interactions with personal assistants like Alexa, Google Home and Siri are typically initiated by a wake term or wakeword. Several personal assistants feature "follow-up" modes that allow users to make additional interactions without the need of a wakeword. For the system to only respond when appropriate, and to ignore speech not intended for it, utterances must be classified as device-directed or non-device-directed. State-of-the-art systems have largely used acoustic features for this task, while others have used only lexical features or have added LM-based lexical features. We propose a directedness classifier that combines semantic lexical features with a lightweight acoustic feature and show it is effective in classifying directedness. The mixed-domain lexical and acoustic feature model is able to achieve 14% relative reduction of EER over a state-of-the-art acoustic-only baseline model. Finally, we successfully apply transfer learning and semi-supervised learning to the model to improve accuracy even further.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.01949,
  title  = {Improving Device Directedness Classification of Utterances with Semantic Lexical Features},
  author = {Kellen Gillespie and Ioannis C. Konstantakopoulos and Xingzhi Guo and Vishal Thanvantri Vasudevan and Abhinav Sethy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.01949},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Accepted and Published at ICASSP 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:02:28.348Z