LeBenchmark 2.0: a Standardized, Replicable and Enhanced Framework for Self-supervised Representations of French Speech

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is at the origin of unprecedented improvements in many different domains including computer vision and natural language processing. Speech processing drastically benefitted from SSL as most of the current domain-related tasks are now being approached with pre-trained models. This work introduces LeBenchmark 2.0 an open-source framework for assessing and building SSL-equipped French speech technologies. It includes documented, large-scale and heterogeneous corpora with up to 14,000 hours of heterogeneous speech, ten pre-trained SSL wav2vec 2.0 models containing from 26 million to one billion learnable parameters shared with the community, and an evaluation protocol made of six downstream tasks to complement existing benchmarks. LeBenchmark 2.0 also presents unique perspectives on pre-trained SSL models for speech with the investigation of frozen versus fine-tuned downstream models, task-agnostic versus task-specific pre-trained models as well as a discussion on the carbon footprint of large-scale model training.

Federated Learning for ASR based on Wav2vec 2.0

This paper presents a study on the use of federated learning to train an ASR model based on a wav2vec 2.0 model pre-trained by self supervision. Carried out on the well-known TED-LIUM 3 dataset, our experiments show that such a model can obtain, with no use of a language model, a word error rate of 10.92% on the official TED-LIUM 3 test set, without sharing any data from the different users. We also analyse the ASR performance for speakers depending to their participation to the federated learning. Since federated learning was first introduced for privacy purposes, we also measure its ability to protect speaker identity. To do that, we exploit an approach to analyze information contained in exchanged models based on a neural network footprint on an indicator dataset. This analysis is made layer-wise and shows which layers in an exchanged wav2vec 2.0 based model bring the speaker identity information.

End-to-end model for named entity recognition from speech without paired training data

Recent works showed that end-to-end neural approaches tend to become very popular for spoken language understanding (SLU). Through the term end-to-end, one considers the use of a single model optimized to extract semantic information directly from the speech signal. A major issue for such models is the lack of paired audio and textual data with semantic annotation. In this paper, we propose an approach to build an end-to-end neural model to extract semantic information in a scenario in which zero paired audio data is available. Our approach is based on the use of an external model trained to generate a sequence of vectorial representations from text. These representations mimic the hidden representations that could be generated inside an end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) model by processing a speech signal. An SLU neural module is then trained using these representations as input and the annotated text as output. Last, the SLU module replaces the top layers of the ASR model to achieve the construction of the end-to-end model. Our experiments on named entity recognition, carried out on the QUAERO corpus, show that this approach is very promising, getting better results than a comparable cascade approach or than the use of synthetic voices.

Retrieving Speaker Information from Personalized Acoustic Models for Speech Recognition

The widespread of powerful personal devices capable of collecting voice of their users has opened the opportunity to build speaker adapted speech recognition system (ASR) or to participate to collaborative learning of ASR. In both cases, personalized acoustic models (AM), i.e. fine-tuned AM with specific speaker data, can be built. A question that naturally arises is whether the dissemination of personalized acoustic models can leak personal information. In this paper, we show that it is possible to retrieve the gender of the speaker, but also his identity, by just exploiting the weight matrix changes of a neural acoustic model locally adapted to this speaker. Incidentally we observe phenomena that may be useful towards explainability of deep neural networks in the context of speech processing. Gender can be identified almost surely using only the first layers and speaker verification performs well when using middle-up layers. Our experimental study on the TED-LIUM 3 dataset with HMM/TDNN models shows an accuracy of 95% for gender detection, and an Equal Error Rate of 9.07% for a speaker verification task by only exploiting the weights from personalized models that could be exchanged instead of user data.

Privacy attacks for automatic speech recognition acoustic models in a federated learning framework

This paper investigates methods to effectively retrieve speaker information from the personalized speaker adapted neural network acoustic models (AMs) in automatic speech recognition (ASR). This problem is especially important in the context of federated learning of ASR acoustic models where a global model is learnt on the server based on the updates received from multiple clients. We propose an approach to analyze information in neural network AMs based on a neural network footprint on the so-called Indicator dataset. Using this method, we develop two attack models that aim to infer speaker identity from the updated personalized models without access to the actual users' speech data. Experiments on the TED-LIUM 3 corpus demonstrate that the proposed approaches are very effective and can provide equal error rate (EER) of 1-2%.

Where are we in semantic concept extraction for Spoken Language Understanding?

Spoken language understanding (SLU) topic has seen a lot of progress these last three years, with the emergence of end-to-end neural approaches. Spoken language understanding refers to natural language processing tasks related to semantic extraction from speech signal, like named entity recognition from speech or slot filling task in a context of human-machine dialogue. Classically, SLU tasks were processed through a cascade approach that consists in applying, firstly, an automatic speech recognition process, followed by a natural language processing module applied to the automatic transcriptions. These three last years, end-to-end neural approaches, based on deep neural networks, have been proposed in order to directly extract the semantics from speech signal, by using a single neural model. More recent works on self-supervised training with unlabeled data open new perspectives in term of performance for automatic speech recognition and natural language processing. In this paper, we present a brief overview of the recent advances on the French MEDIA benchmark dataset for SLU, with or without the use of additional data. We also present our last results that significantly outperform the current state-of-the-art with a Concept Error Rate (CER) of 11.2%, instead of 13.6% for the last state-of-the-art system presented this year.

LeBenchmark: A Reproducible Framework for Assessing Self-Supervised Representation Learning from Speech

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) using huge unlabeled data has been successfully explored for image and natural language processing. Recent works also investigated SSL from speech. They were notably successful to improve performance on downstream tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR). While these works suggest it is possible to reduce dependence on labeled data for building efficient speech systems, their evaluation was mostly made on ASR and using multiple and heterogeneous experimental settings (most of them for English). This renders difficult the objective comparison between SSL approaches and the evaluation of their impact on building speech systems. In this paper, we propose LeBenchmark: a reproducible framework for assessing SSL from speech. It not only includes ASR (high and low resource) tasks but also spoken language understanding, speech translation and emotion recognition. We also target speech technologies in a language different than English: French. SSL models of different sizes are trained from carefully sourced and documented datasets. Experiments show that SSL is beneficial for most but not all tasks which confirms the need for exhaustive and reliable benchmarks to evaluate its real impact. LeBenchmark is shared with the scientific community for reproducible research in SSL from speech.