Phonemic and Graphemic Multilingual CTC Based Speech Recognition

Training automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems requires large amounts of data in the target language in order to achieve good performance. Whereas large training corpora are readily available for languages like English, there exists a long tail of languages which do suffer from a lack of resources. One method to handle data sparsity is to use data from additional source languages and build a multilingual system. Recently, ASR systems based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained with connectionist temporal classification (CTC) have gained substantial research interest. In this work, we extended our previous approach towards training CTC-based systems multilingually. Our systems feature a global phone set, based on the joint phone sets of each source language. We evaluated the use of different language combinations as well as the addition of Language Feature Vectors (LFVs). As contrastive experiment, we built systems based on graphemes as well. Systems having a multilingual phone set are known to suffer in performance compared to their monolingual counterparts. With our proposed approach, we could reduce the gap between these mono- and multilingual setups, using either graphemes or phonemes.

Transcribing Against Time

We investigate the problem of manually correcting errors from an automatic speech transcript in a cost-sensitive fashion. This is done by specifying a fixed time budget, and then automatically choosing location and size of segments for correction such that the number of corrected errors is maximized. The core components, as suggested by previous research [1], are a utility model that estimates the number of errors in a particular segment, and a cost model that estimates annotation effort for the segment. In this work we propose a dynamic updating framework that allows for the training of cost models during the ongoing transcription process. This removes the need for transcriber enrollment prior to the actual transcription, and improves correction efficiency by allowing highly transcriber-adaptive cost modeling. We first confirm and analyze the improvements afforded by this method in a simulated study. We then conduct a realistic user study, observing efficiency improvements of 15% relative on average, and 42% for the participants who deviated most strongly from our initial, transcriber-agnostic cost model. Moreover, we find that our updating framework can capture dynamically changing factors, such as transcriber fatigue and topic familiarity, which we observe to have a large influence on the transcriber's working behavior.

Comparison of Decoding Strategies for CTC Acoustic Models

Connectionist Temporal Classification has recently attracted a lot of interest as it offers an elegant approach to building acoustic models (AMs) for speech recognition. The CTC loss function maps an input sequence of observable feature vectors to an output sequence of symbols. Output symbols are conditionally independent of each other under CTC loss, so a language model (LM) can be incorporated conveniently during decoding, retaining the traditional separation of acoustic and linguistic components in ASR. For fixed vocabularies, Weighted Finite State Transducers provide a strong baseline for efficient integration of CTC AMs with n-gram LMs. Character-based neural LMs provide a straight forward solution for open vocabulary speech recognition and all-neural models, and can be decoded with beam search. Finally, sequence-to-sequence models can be used to translate a sequence of individual sounds into a word string. We compare the performance of these three approaches, and analyze their error patterns, which provides insightful guidance for future research and development in this important area.

Analyzing Neural MT Search and Model Performance

In this paper, we offer an in-depth analysis about the modeling and search performance. We address the question if a more complex search algorithm is necessary. Furthermore, we investigate the question if more complex models which might only be applicable during rescoring are promising. By separating the search space and the modeling using $n$-best list reranking, we analyze the influence of both parts of an NMT system independently. By comparing differently performing NMT systems, we show that the better translation is already in the search space of the translation systems with less performance. This results indicate that the current search algorithms are sufficient for the NMT systems. Furthermore, we could show that even a relatively small $n$-best list of $50$ hypotheses already contain notably better translations.

Neural Lattice-to-Sequence Models for Uncertain Inputs

The input to a neural sequence-to-sequence model is often determined by an up-stream system, e.g. a word segmenter, part of speech tagger, or speech recognizer. These up-stream models are potentially error-prone. Representing inputs through word lattices allows making this uncertainty explicit by capturing alternative sequences and their posterior probabilities in a compact form. In this work, we extend the TreeLSTM (Tai et al., 2015) into a LatticeLSTM that is able to consume word lattices, and can be used as encoder in an attentional encoder-decoder model. We integrate lattice posterior scores into this architecture by extending the TreeLSTM's child-sum and forget gates and introducing a bias term into the attention mechanism. We experiment with speech translation lattices and report consistent improvements over baselines that translate either the 1-best hypothesis or the lattice without posterior scores.

Yeah, Right, Uh-Huh: A Deep Learning Backchannel Predictor

Using supporting backchannel (BC) cues can make human-computer interaction more social. BCs provide a feedback from the listener to the speaker indicating to the speaker that he is still listened to. BCs can be expressed in different ways, depending on the modality of the interaction, for example as gestures or acoustic cues. In this work, we only considered acoustic cues. We are proposing an approach towards detecting BC opportunities based on acoustic input features like power and pitch. While other works in the field rely on the use of a hand-written rule set or specialized features, we made use of artificial neural networks. They are capable of deriving higher order features from input features themselves. In our setup, we first used a fully connected feed-forward network to establish an updated baseline in comparison to our previously proposed setup. We also extended this setup by the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks which have shown to outperform feed-forward based setups on various tasks. Our best system achieved an F1-Score of 0.37 using power and pitch features. Adding linguistic information using word2vec, the score increased to 0.39.

Pre-Translation for Neural Machine Translation

Recently, the development of neural machine translation (NMT) has significantly improved the translation quality of automatic machine translation. While most sentences are more accurate and fluent than translations by statistical machine translation (SMT)-based systems, in some cases, the NMT system produces translations that have a completely different meaning. This is especially the case when rare words occur. When using statistical machine translation, it has already been shown that significant gains can be achieved by simplifying the input in a preprocessing step. A commonly used example is the pre-reordering approach. In this work, we used phrase-based machine translation to pre-translate the input into the target language. Then a neural machine translation system generates the final hypothesis using the pre-translation. Thereby, we use either only the output of the phrase-based machine translation (PBMT) system or a combination of the PBMT output and the source sentence. We evaluate the technique on the English to German translation task. Using this approach we are able to outperform the PBMT system as well as the baseline neural MT system by up to 2 BLEU points. We analyzed the influence of the quality of the initial system on the final result.

Lexical Translation Model Using a Deep Neural Network Architecture

In this paper we combine the advantages of a model using global source sentence contexts, the Discriminative Word Lexicon, and neural networks. By using deep neural networks instead of the linear maximum entropy model in the Discriminative Word Lexicon models, we are able to leverage dependencies between different source words due to the non-linearity. Furthermore, the models for different target words can share parameters and therefore data sparsity problems are effectively reduced. By using this approach in a state-of-the-art translation system, we can improve the performance by up to 0.5 BLEU points for three different language pairs on the TED translation task.

Recovering From Parser Failures: A Hybrid Statistical/Symbolic Approach

We describe an implementation of a hybrid statistical/symbolic approach to repairing parser failures in a speech-to-speech translation system. We describe a module which takes as input a fragmented parse and returns a repaired meaning representation. It negotiates with the speaker about what the complete meaning of the utterance is by generating hypotheses about how to fit the fragments of the partial parse together into a coherent meaning representation. By drawing upon both statistical and symbolic information, it constrains its repair hypotheses to those which are both likely and meaningful. Because it updates its statistical model during use, it improves its performance over time.