Related papers: Large-scale Transfer Learning for Low-resource Spo…

Different flavors of transfer learning have shown tremendous impact in advancing research and applications of machine learning. In this work we study the use of a specific family of transfer learning, where the target domain is mapped to…

Attention-based models have shown significant improvement over traditional algorithms in several NLP tasks. The Transformer, for instance, is an illustrative example that generates abstract representations of tokens inputted to an encoder…

Recognizing overlapping speech from multiple speakers in conversational scenarios is one of the most challenging problem for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Serialized output training (SOT) is a classic method to address multi-talker…

As the landscape of large language models expands, efficiently finetuning for specific tasks becomes increasingly crucial. At the same time, the landscape of parameter-efficient finetuning methods rapidly expands. Consequently,…

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) models are a class of model architectures that predict semantics directly from speech. Because of their input and output types, we refer to them as speech-to-interpretation (STI) models.…

Spoken language understanding (SLU), one of the key enabling technologies for human-computer interaction in IoT devices, provides an easy-to-use user interface. Human speech can contain a lot of user-sensitive information, such as gender,…

Transformers have achieved success in both language and vision domains. However, it is prohibitively expensive to scale them to long sequences such as long documents or high-resolution images, because self-attention mechanism has quadratic…

Recently, it has been argued that encoder-decoder models can be made more interpretable by replacing the softmax function in the attention with its sparse variants. In this work, we introduce a novel, simple method for achieving sparsity in…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) requires a model to analyze input acoustic signal to understand its linguistic content and make predictions. To boost the models' performance, various pre-training methods have been proposed to learn rich…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) converts user utterances into structured semantic representations. Data sparsity is one of the main obstacles of SLU due to the high cost of human annotation, especially when domain changes or a new…

Neural machine translation is known to require large numbers of parallel training sentences, which generally prevent it from excelling on low-resource language pairs. This thesis explores the use of cross-lingual transfer learning on neural…

Unsupervised pre-training is now the predominant approach for both text and speech understanding. Self-attention models pre-trained on large amounts of unannotated data have been hugely successful when fine-tuned on downstream tasks from a…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a critical component of voice assistants; it consists of converting speech to semantic parses for task execution. Previous works have explored end-to-end models to improve the quality and robustness of…

Recurrent Neural Network Transducer (RNN-T), like most end-to-end speech recognition model architectures, has an implicit neural network language model (NNLM) and cannot easily leverage unpaired text data during training. Previous work has…

Recent advancements in attention mechanisms have replaced recurrent neural networks and its variants for machine translation tasks. Transformer using attention mechanism solely achieved state-of-the-art results in sequence modeling. Neural…

The success in designing Code-Switching (CS) ASR often depends on the availability of the transcribed CS resources. Such dependency harms the development of ASR in low-resourced languages such as Bengali and Hindi. In this paper, we exploit…

Learning intents and slot labels from user utterances is a fundamental step in all spoken language understanding (SLU) and dialog systems. State-of-the-art neural network based methods, after deployment, often suffer from performance…

Large multilingual models, such as mBERT, have shown promise in crosslingual transfer. In this work, we employ pruning to quantify the robustness and interpret layer-wise importance of mBERT. On four GLUE tasks, the relative drops in…

Research in multilingual speech-to-text translation is topical. Having a single model that supports multiple translation tasks is desirable. The goal of this work it to improve cross-lingual transfer learning in multilingual speech-to-text…

While achieving state-of-the-art results in multiple tasks and languages, translation-based cross-lingual transfer is often overlooked in favour of massively multilingual pre-trained encoders. Arguably, this is due to its main limitations:…