Word Segmentation on Discovered Phone Units with Dynamic Programming and Self-Supervised Scoring

Recent work on unsupervised speech segmentation has used self-supervised models with a phone segmentation module and a word segmentation module that are trained jointly. This paper compares this joint methodology with an older idea: bottom-up phone-like unit discovery is performed first, and symbolic word segmentation is then performed on top of the discovered units (without influencing the lower level). I specifically describe a duration-penalized dynamic programming (DPDP) procedure that can be used for either phone or word segmentation by changing the self-supervised scoring network that gives segment costs. For phone discovery, DPDP is applied with a contrastive predictive coding clustering model, while for word segmentation it is used with an autoencoding recurrent neural network. The two models are chained in order to segment speech. This approach gives comparable word segmentation results to state-of-the-art joint self-supervised models on an English benchmark. On French and Mandarin data, it outperforms previous systems on the ZeroSpeech benchmarks. Analysis shows that the chained DPDP system segments shorter filler words well, but longer words might require an external top-down signal.