Related papers: Unsupervised Word Segmentation from Discrete Speec…

We investigate segmenting and clustering speech into low-bitrate phone-like sequences without supervision. We specifically constrain pretrained self-supervised vector-quantized (VQ) neural networks so that blocks of contiguous feature…

Segmenting a chunk of text into words is usually the first step of processing Chinese text, but its necessity has rarely been explored. In this paper, we ask the fundamental question of whether Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is necessary…

Recently, sequence-to-sequence models with attention have been successfully applied in Text-to-speech (TTS). These models can generate near-human speech with a large accurately-transcribed speech corpus. However, preparing such a large…

Typically, unsupervised segmentation of speech into the phone and word-like units are treated as separate tasks and are often done via different methods which do not fully leverage the inter-dependence of the two tasks. Here, we unify them…

Multilingual Word Embeddings (MWEs) represent words from multiple languages in a single distributional vector space. Unsupervised MWE (UMWE) methods acquire multilingual embeddings without cross-lingual supervision, which is a significant…

In settings where only unlabelled speech data is available, zero-resource speech technology needs to be developed without transcriptions, pronunciation dictionaries, or language modelling text. There are two central problems in…

Segmentation remains an important preprocessing step both in languages where "words" or other important syntactic/semantic units (like morphemes) are not clearly delineated by white space, as well as when dealing with continuous speech…

Speaker recognition deals with recognizing speakers by their speech. Most speaker recognition systems are built upon two stages, the first stage extracts low dimensional correlation embeddings from speech, and the second performs the…

We present the Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2020, which aims at learning speech representations from raw audio signals without any labels. It combines the data sets and metrics from two previous benchmarks (2017 and 2019) and features two…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems can be trained to achieve remarkable performance given large amounts of manually transcribed speech, but large labeled data sets can be difficult or expensive to acquire for all languages of…

Continuous speech can be converted into a discrete sequence by deriving discrete units from the hidden features of self-supervised learned (SSL) speech models. Although SSL models are becoming larger and trained on more data, they are often…

In this work, we showcase a cost-effective method for generating training data for speech processing tasks. First, we transcribe unlabeled speech using a state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model. Next, we align generated…

Existing methods for CWS usually rely on a large number of labeled sentences to train word segmentation models, which are expensive and time-consuming to annotate. Luckily, the unlabeled data is usually easy to collect and many high-quality…

In real-world scenarios, speech signals are inevitably corrupted by various types of interference, making speech enhancement (SE) a critical task for robust speech processing. However, most existing SE methods only handle a limited range of…

Inspired by early research on exploring naturally annotated data for Chinese word segmentation (CWS), and also by recent research on integration of speech and text processing, this work for the first time proposes to mine word boundaries…

Representing speech and audio signals in discrete units has become a compelling alternative to traditional high-dimensional feature vectors. Numerous studies have highlighted the efficacy of discrete units in various applications such as…

This work profoundly analyzes discrete self-supervised speech representations (units) through the eyes of Generative Spoken Language Modeling (GSLM). Following the findings of such an analysis, we propose practical improvements to the…

In a hybrid speech model, both voiced and unvoiced components can coexist in a segment. Often, the voiced speech is regarded as the deterministic component, and the unvoiced speech and additive noise are the stochastic components.…

Acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) are vector representations of spoken word segments. AWEs can be learned jointly with embeddings of character sequences, to generate phonetically meaningful embeddings of written words, or acoustically…

We propose UnitSpeech, a speaker-adaptive speech synthesis method that fine-tunes a diffusion-based text-to-speech (TTS) model using minimal untranscribed data. To achieve this, we use the self-supervised unit representation as a pseudo…