Related papers: A neural prosody encoder for end-ro-end dialogue a…

Accent classification or AC is a task to predict the accent type of an input utterance, and it can be used as a preliminary step toward accented speech recognition and accent conversion. Existing studies have often achieved such…

Identifying whether an utterance is a statement, question, greeting, and so forth is integral to effective automatic understanding of natural dialog. Little is known, however, about how such dialog acts (DAs) can be automatically classified…

Classifying the general intent of the user utterance in a conversation, also known as Dialogue Act (DA), e.g., open-ended question, statement of opinion, or request for an opinion, is a key step in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for…

Though significant progress has been made for the voice conversion (VC) of typical speech, VC for atypical speech, e.g., dysarthric and second-language (L2) speech, remains a challenge, since it involves correcting for atypical prosody…

With the acceleration of globalization, more and more people are willing or required to learn second languages (L2). One of the major remaining challenges facing current mispronunciation and diagnosis (MDD) models for use in…

End-to-end (E2E) models, which directly predict output character sequences given input speech, are good candidates for on-device speech recognition. E2E models, however, present numerous challenges: In order to be truly useful, such models…

End-to-end (E2E) neural modeling has emerged as one predominant school of thought to develop computer-assisted language training (CAPT) systems, showing competitive performance to conventional pronunciation-scoring based methods. However,…

Spoken language understanding, which extracts intents and/or semantic concepts in utterances, is conventionally formulated as a post-processing of automatic speech recognition. It is usually trained with oracle transcripts, but needs to…

Recent years have seen significant advances in end-to-end (E2E) spoken language understanding (SLU) systems, which directly predict intents and slots from spoken audio. While dialogue history has been exploited to improve conventional…

Recent works have proposed neural models for dialog act classification in spoken dialogs. However, they have not explored the role and the usefulness of acoustic information. We propose a neural model that processes both lexical and…

In conversational speech, the acoustic signal provides cues that help listeners disambiguate difficult parses. For automatically parsing spoken utterances, we introduce a model that integrates transcribed text and acoustic-prosodic features…

The prosody of a spoken utterance, including features like stress, intonation and rhythm, can significantly affect the underlying semantics, and as a consequence can also affect its textual translation. Nevertheless, prosody is rarely…

Emotion Cause Extraction in Conversations (ECEC) aims to extract the utterances which contain the emotional cause in conversations. Most prior research focuses on modelling conversational contexts with sequential encoding, ignoring the…

Dialogue act recognition is an important component of a large number of natural language processing pipelines. Many research works have been carried out in this area, but relatively few investigate deep neural networks and word embeddings.…

It is challenging to extract semantic meanings directly from audio signals in spoken language understanding (SLU), due to the lack of textual information. Popular end-to-end (E2E) SLU models utilize sequence-to-sequence automatic speech…

In end-to-end dialogue modeling and agent learning, it is important to (1) effectively learn knowledge from data, and (2) fully utilize heterogeneous information, e.g., dialogue act flow and utterances. However, the majority of existing…

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question, Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts…

This report proposes state-of-the-art research in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Mispronunciation detection is one of the core components of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems which is a subset…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a core task in most human-machine interaction systems. With the emergence of smart homes, smart phones and smart speakers, SLU has become a key technology for the industry. In a classical SLU approach,…

End-to-End (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems used in voice assistants often have difficulties recognizing infrequent words personalized to the user, such as names and places. Rare words often have non-trivial pronunciations,…