Bootstrapping meaning through listening: Unsupervised learning of spoken sentence embeddings

Inducing semantic representations directly from speech signals is a highly challenging task but has many useful applications in speech mining and spoken language understanding. This study tackles the unsupervised learning of semantic representations for spoken utterances. Through converting speech signals into hidden units generated from acoustic unit discovery, we propose WavEmbed, a multimodal sequential autoencoder that predicts hidden units from a dense representation of speech. Secondly, we also propose S-HuBERT to induce meaning through knowledge distillation, in which a sentence embedding model is first trained on hidden units and passes its knowledge to a speech encoder through contrastive learning. The best performing model achieves a moderate correlation (0.5~0.6) with human judgments, without relying on any labels or transcriptions. Furthermore, these models can also be easily extended to leverage textual transcriptions of speech to learn much better speech embeddings that are strongly correlated with human annotations. Our proposed methods are applicable to the development of purely data-driven systems for speech mining, indexing and search.

Convolutional Neural Networks with A Topographic Representation Module for EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Objective: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown great potential in the field of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). The raw Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal is usually represented as 2-Dimensional (2-D) matrix composed of channels and time points, which ignores the spatial topological information. Our goal is to make the CNN with the raw EEG signal as input have the ability to learn EEG spatial topological features, and improve its performance while essentially maintaining its original structure. Methods:We propose an EEG Topographic Representation Module (TRM). This module consists of (1) a mapping block from the raw EEG signal to a 3-D topographic map and (2) a convolution block from the topographic map to an output of the same size as input. According to the size of the kernel used in the convolution block, we design 2 types of TRMs, namely TRM-(5,5) and TRM-(3,3). We embed the TRM into 3 widely used CNNs, and tested them on 2 publicly available datasets (Emergency Braking During Simulated Driving Dataset (EBDSDD), and High Gamma Dataset (HGD)). Results: The results show that the classification accuracies of all 3 CNNs are improved on both datasets after using the TRM. With TRM-(5,5), the average accuracies of DeepConvNet, EEGNet and ShallowConvNet are improved by 6.54%, 1.72% and 2.07% on EBDSDD, and by 6.05%, 3.02% and 5.14% on HGD, respectively; with TRM-(3,3), they are improved by 7.76%, 1.71% and 2.17% on EBDSDD, and by 7.61%, 5.06% and 6.28% on HGD, respectively. Significance: We improve the classification performance of 3 CNNs on 2 datasets by the use of TRM, indicating that it has the capability to mine the EEG spatial topological information. In addition, since the output of TRM has the same size as the input, CNNs with the raw EEG signal as input can use this module without changing their original structures.

Ultra2Speech -- A Deep Learning Framework for Formant Frequency Estimation and Tracking from Ultrasound Tongue Images

Thousands of individuals need surgical removal of their larynx due to critical diseases every year and therefore, require an alternative form of communication to articulate speech sounds after the loss of their voice box. This work addresses the articulatory-to-acoustic mapping problem based on ultrasound (US) tongue images for the development of a silent-speech interface (SSI) that can provide them with an assistance in their daily interactions. Our approach targets automatically extracting tongue movement information by selecting an optimal feature set from US images and mapping these features to the acoustic space. We use a novel deep learning architecture to map US tongue images from the US probe placed beneath a subject's chin to formants that we call, Ultrasound2Formant (U2F) Net. It uses hybrid spatio-temporal 3D convolutions followed by feature shuffling, for the estimation and tracking of vowel formants from US images. The formant values are then utilized to synthesize continuous time-varying vowel trajectories, via Klatt Synthesizer. Our best model achieves R-squared (R^2) measure of 99.96% for the regression task. Our network lays the foundation for an SSI as it successfully tracks the tongue contour automatically as an internal representation without any explicit annotation.