Jointly Learning to Align and Convert Graphemes to Phonemes with Neural Attention Models

We propose an attention-enabled encoder-decoder model for the problem of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Most previous work has tackled the problem via joint sequence models that require explicit alignments for training. In contrast, the attention-enabled encoder-decoder model allows for jointly learning to align and convert characters to phonemes. We explore different types of attention models, including global and local attention, and our best models achieve state-of-the-art results on three standard data sets (CMUDict, Pronlex, and NetTalk).

Lexicon-Free Fingerspelling Recognition from Video: Data, Models, and Signer Adaptation

We study the problem of recognizing video sequences of fingerspelled letters in American Sign Language (ASL). Fingerspelling comprises a significant but relatively understudied part of ASL. Recognizing fingerspelling is challenging for a number of reasons: It involves quick, small motions that are often highly coarticulated; it exhibits significant variation between signers; and there has been a dearth of continuous fingerspelling data collected. In this work we collect and annotate a new data set of continuous fingerspelling videos, compare several types of recognizers, and explore the problem of signer variation. Our best-performing models are segmental (semi-Markov) conditional random fields using deep neural network-based features. In the signer-dependent setting, our recognizers achieve up to about 92% letter accuracy. The multi-signer setting is much more challenging, but with neural network adaptation we achieve up to 83% letter accuracies in this setting.

Discriminative Segmental Cascades for Feature-Rich Phone Recognition

Discriminative segmental models, such as segmental conditional random fields (SCRFs) and segmental structured support vector machines (SSVMs), have had success in speech recognition via both lattice rescoring and first-pass decoding. However, such models suffer from slow decoding, hampering the use of computationally expensive features, such as segment neural networks or other high-order features. A typical solution is to use approximate decoding, either by beam pruning in a single pass or by beam pruning to generate a lattice followed by a second pass. In this work, we study discriminative segmental models trained with a hinge loss (i.e., segmental structured SVMs). We show that beam search is not suitable for learning rescoring models in this approach, though it gives good approximate decoding performance when the model is already well-trained. Instead, we consider an approach inspired by structured prediction cascades, which use max-marginal pruning to generate lattices. We obtain a high-accuracy phonetic recognition system with several expensive feature types: a segment neural network, a second-order language model, and second-order phone boundary features.

Efficient Segmental Cascades for Speech Recognition

Discriminative segmental models offer a way to incorporate flexible feature functions into speech recognition. However, their appeal has been limited by their computational requirements, due to the large number of possible segments to consider. Multi-pass cascades of segmental models introduce features of increasing complexity in different passes, where in each pass a segmental model rescores lattices produced by a previous (simpler) segmental model. In this paper, we explore several ways of making segmental cascades efficient and practical: reducing the feature set in the first pass, frame subsampling, and various pruning approaches. In experiments on phonetic recognition, we find that with a combination of such techniques, it is possible to maintain competitive performance while greatly reducing decoding, pruning, and training time.

Charagram: Embedding Words and Sentences via Character n-grams

We present Charagram embeddings, a simple approach for learning character-based compositional models to embed textual sequences. A word or sentence is represented using a character n-gram count vector, followed by a single nonlinear transformation to yield a low-dimensional embedding. We use three tasks for evaluation: word similarity, sentence similarity, and part-of-speech tagging. We demonstrate that Charagram embeddings outperform more complex architectures based on character-level recurrent and convolutional neural networks, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on several similarity tasks.

Mapping Unseen Words to Task-Trained Embedding Spaces

We consider the supervised training setting in which we learn task-specific word embeddings. We assume that we start with initial embeddings learned from unlabelled data and update them to learn task-specific embeddings for words in the supervised training data. However, for new words in the test set, we must use either their initial embeddings or a single unknown embedding, which often leads to errors. We address this by learning a neural network to map from initial embeddings to the task-specific embedding space, via a multi-loss objective function. The technique is general, but here we demonstrate its use for improved dependency parsing (especially for sentences with out-of-vocabulary words), as well as for downstream improvements on sentiment analysis.

Towards Universal Paraphrastic Sentence Embeddings

We consider the problem of learning general-purpose, paraphrastic sentence embeddings based on supervision from the Paraphrase Database (Ganitkevitch et al., 2013). We compare six compositional architectures, evaluating them on annotated textual similarity datasets drawn both from the same distribution as the training data and from a wide range of other domains. We find that the most complex architectures, such as long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks, perform best on the in-domain data. However, in out-of-domain scenarios, simple architectures such as word averaging vastly outperform LSTMs. Our simplest averaging model is even competitive with systems tuned for the particular tasks while also being extremely efficient and easy to use. In order to better understand how these architectures compare, we conduct further experiments on three supervised NLP tasks: sentence similarity, entailment, and sentiment classification. We again find that the word averaging models perform well for sentence similarity and entailment, outperforming LSTMs. However, on sentiment classification, we find that the LSTM performs very strongly-even recording new state-of-the-art performance on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank. We then demonstrate how to combine our pretrained sentence embeddings with these supervised tasks, using them both as a prior and as a black box feature extractor. This leads to performance rivaling the state of the art on the SICK similarity and entailment tasks. We release all of our resources to the research community with the hope that they can serve as the new baseline for further work on universal sentence embeddings.

Large-Scale Approximate Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis

Kernel canonical correlation analysis (KCCA) is a nonlinear multi-view representation learning technique with broad applicability in statistics and machine learning. Although there is a closed-form solution for the KCCA objective, it involves solving an $N\times N$ eigenvalue system where $N$ is the training set size, making its computational requirements in both memory and time prohibitive for large-scale problems. Various approximation techniques have been developed for KCCA. A commonly used approach is to first transform the original inputs to an $M$-dimensional random feature space so that inner products in the feature space approximate kernel evaluations, and then apply linear CCA to the transformed inputs. In many applications, however, the dimensionality $M$ of the random feature space may need to be very large in order to obtain a sufficiently good approximation; it then becomes challenging to perform the linear CCA step on the resulting very high-dimensional data matrices. We show how to use a stochastic optimization algorithm, recently proposed for linear CCA and its neural-network extension, to further alleviate the computation requirements of approximate KCCA. This approach allows us to run approximate KCCA on a speech dataset with $1.4$ million training samples and a random feature space of dimensionality $M=100000$ on a typical workstation.

Signer-independent Fingerspelling Recognition with Deep Neural Network Adaptation

We study the problem of recognition of fingerspelled letter sequences in American Sign Language in a signer-independent setting. Fingerspelled sequences are both challenging and important to recognize, as they are used for many content words such as proper nouns and technical terms. Previous work has shown that it is possible to achieve almost 90% accuracies on fingerspelling recognition in a signer-dependent setting. However, the more realistic signer-independent setting presents challenges due to significant variations among signers, coupled with the dearth of available training data. We investigate this problem with approaches inspired by automatic speech recognition. We start with the best-performing approaches from prior work, based on tandem models and segmental conditional random fields (SCRFs), with features based on deep neural network (DNN) classifiers of letters and phonological features. Using DNN adaptation, we find that it is possible to bridge a large part of the gap between signer-dependent and signer-independent performance. Using only about 115 transcribed words for adaptation from the target signer, we obtain letter accuracies of up to 82.7% with frame-level adaptation labels and 69.7% with only word labels.

Nonparametric Canonical Correlation Analysis

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a classical representation learning technique for finding correlated variables in multi-view data. Several nonlinear extensions of the original linear CCA have been proposed, including kernel and deep neural network methods. These approaches seek maximally correlated projections among families of functions, which the user specifies (by choosing a kernel or neural network structure), and are computationally demanding. Interestingly, the theory of nonlinear CCA, without functional restrictions, had been studied in the population setting by Lancaster already in the 1950s, but these results have not inspired practical algorithms. We revisit Lancaster's theory to devise a practical algorithm for nonparametric CCA (NCCA). Specifically, we show that the solution can be expressed in terms of the singular value decomposition of a certain operator associated with the joint density of the views. Thus, by estimating the population density from data, NCCA reduces to solving an eigenvalue system, superficially like kernel CCA but, importantly, without requiring the inversion of any kernel matrix. We also derive a partially linear CCA (PLCCA) variant in which one of the views undergoes a linear projection while the other is nonparametric. Using a kernel density estimate based on a small number of nearest neighbors, our NCCA and PLCCA algorithms are memory-efficient, often run much faster, and perform better than kernel CCA and comparable to deep CCA.