Multitask Detection of Speaker Changes, Overlapping Speech and Voice Activity Using wav2vec 2.0

Self-supervised learning approaches have lately achieved great success on a broad spectrum of machine learning problems. In the field of speech processing, one of the most successful recent self-supervised models is wav2vec 2.0. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of this model on three basic speech classification tasks: speaker change detection, overlapped speech detection, and voice activity detection. First, we concentrate on only one task -- speaker change detection -- where our proposed system surpasses the previously reported results on four different corpora, and achieves comparable performance even when trained on out-of-domain data from an artificially designed dataset. Then we expand our approach to tackle all three tasks in a single multitask system with state-of-the-art performance on the AMI corpus. The implementation of the algorithms in this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/mkunes/w2v2_audioFrameClassification.

Detection of Prosodic Boundaries in Speech Using Wav2Vec 2.0

Prosodic boundaries in speech are of great relevance to both speech synthesis and audio annotation. In this paper, we apply the wav2vec 2.0 framework to the task of detecting these boundaries in speech signal, using only acoustic information. We test the approach on a set of recordings of Czech broadcast news, labeled by phonetic experts, and compare it to an existing text-based predictor, which uses the transcripts of the same data. Despite using a relatively small amount of labeled data, the wav2vec2 model achieves an accuracy of 94% and F1 measure of 83% on within-sentence prosodic boundaries (or 95% and 89% on all prosodic boundaries), outperforming the text-based approach. However, by combining the outputs of the two different models we can improve the results even further.