Sparse and Low-rank Modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition

This thesis deals with exploiting the low-dimensional multi-subspace structure of speech towards the goal of improving acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Leveraging the parsimonious hierarchical nature of speech, we hypothesize that whenever a speech signal is measured in a high-dimensional feature space, the true class information is embedded in low-dimensional subspaces whereas noise is scattered as random high-dimensional erroneous estimations in the features. In this context, the contribution of this thesis is twofold: (i) identify sparse and low-rank modeling approaches as excellent tools for extracting the class-specific low-dimensional subspaces in speech features, and (ii) employ these tools under novel ASR frameworks to enrich the acoustic information present in the speech features towards the goal of improving ASR. Techniques developed in this thesis focus on deep neural network (DNN) based posterior features which, under the sparse and low-rank modeling approaches, unveil the underlying class-specific low-dimensional subspaces very elegantly.

In this thesis, we tackle ASR tasks of varying difficulty, ranging from isolated word recognition (IWR) and connected digit recognition (CDR) to large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR). For IWR and CDR, we propose a novel \textit{Compressive Sensing} (CS) perspective towards ASR. Here exemplar-based speech recognition is posed as a problem of recovering sparse high-dimensional word representations from compressed low-dimensional phonetic representations. In the context of LVCSR, this thesis argues that albeit their power in representation learning, DNN based acoustic models still have room for improvement in exploiting the \textit{union of low-dimensional subspaces} structure of speech data. Therefore, this thesis proposes to enhance DNN posteriors by projecting them onto the manifolds of the underlying classes using principal component analysis (PCA) or compressive sensing based dictionaries. Projected posteriors are shown to be more accurate training targets for learning better acoustic models, resulting in improved ASR performance. The proposed approach is evaluated on both close-talk and far-field conditions, confirming the importance of sparse and low-rank modeling of speech in building a robust ASR framework. Finally, the conclusions of this thesis are further consolidated by an information theoretic analysis approach which explicitly quantifies the contribution of proposed techniques in improving ASR.

Language Independent Query by Example Spoken Term Detection

Dhananjay Ram

Language independent query-by-example spoken term detection (QbE-STD) is the problem of retrieving audio documents from an archive, which contain a spoken query provided by a user. This is usually casted as a hypothesis testing and pattern matching problem, also referred to as a ``zero-resource task'' since no specific training or lexical information is required to represent the spoken query. Thus it enables multilingual search on unconstrained speech without requiring a full speech recognition system. State-of-the-art solutions typically rely on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) based template matching using phone posteriors features estimated by Deep Neural Networks (DNN). In this thesis, we aim at exploiting the low-dimensional subspace structure of speech signal, resulting from the constrained human speech production process. We exploit this subspace structure to improve over the state-of-the-art to (1) generate better phone or phonological posterior features, and (2) to improve the matching algorithm. To enhance phone posteriors, we learn the underlying phonetic subspaces in an unsupervised way, and use the sub-phonetic attributes to extract the phonological components in a supervised manner. To improve the matching algorithm, we model the subspaces of the spoken query using its phone posterior representation. The resulting model is used to compute distances between the subspaces of the query and the phone posteriors of each audio document. These distances are then used to detect occurrences of the spoken query, while also regularizing the DTW to improve the detection scores. In addition to optimizing different components of the state-of-the-art system, we propose a novel DNN-based QbE-STD system to provide an end-to-end learning framework. Towards that end, we replace the DTW based matching with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture. We also learn multilingual features, aimed at obtaining language independent representation. Finally, we integrate the feature learning and CNN-based matching to jointly train and further improve the QbE-STD performance. We perform experiments using the challenging AMI meeting corpus (English), as well as multilingual datasets such as Spoken Web Search 2013 and Query by Example Search on Speech Task 2014, and show significant improvements over a very competitive state-of-the-art system.

EPFL2019

HMM mixtures (HMM2) for robust speech recognition

Katrin Weber

State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques are typically based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) for the modeling of temporal sequences of feature vectors extracted from the speech signal. At the level of each HMM state, Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) or artificial neural networks (ANNs) are commonly used in order to model the state emission probabilities. However, both GMMs and ANNs are rather rigid, as they are incapable of adapting to variations inherent in the speech signal, such as inter- and intra-speaker variations. Moreover, performance degradations of these systems are severe in the case of unmatched conditions such as in the presence of environmental noise. A lot of research effort is currently being devoted to overcoming these problems. The principal objective of this thesis is to explore new approaches towards a more robust and adaptive modeling of speech. In this context, different aspects of the modeling of speech data with HMMs and GMMs are investigated. Particular attention is given to the modeling of correlation. While correlation between different feature vectors (corresponding to temporal correlation) is typically modeled by the HMM, correlation between feature vector components (e.g., correlation in frequency) is modeled by the GMM part of the model. This thesis starts with the investigation of two potential ways to improve the modeling of correlation, consisting of (1) a shift of the modeling of temporal correlation towards GMMs, and (2) the modeling of correlation within each feature vector by a particular type of HMM. This leads to the development of a novel approach, referred to as "HMM2", which is a major focus of this thesis. HMM2 is a particular mixture of hidden Markov models, where state emission probabilities of the temporal (primary) HMM are modeled through (secondary) state-dependent frequency-based HMMs. Low-dimensional GMMs are used for modeling the state emission probabilities of the secondary HMM states. Therefore, HMM2 can be seen as a generalization of conventional HMMs, which they include as a particular case. HMM2 may have several advantages as compared to standard systems. While the primary HMM performs time warping and time integration, the secondary HMM performs warping and integration along the frequency dimension of the speech signal. Frequency correlation is modeled through the secondary HMM topology. Due to the implicit, non-linear, state-dependent spectral warping performed by the secondary HMM, HMM2 may be viewed as a dynamic extension of the multi-band approach. Moreover, this frequency warping property may result in a better, more flexible modeling and parameter sharing. After an investigation of theoretical and practical aspects of HMM2, encouraging recognition results for the case of speech degraded by additive noise are given. Due to the spectral warping property of HMM2, this model is able to extract pertinent structural information of the speech signal, which is reflected in the trained model parameters. Consequently, such an HMM2 system can also be used to explicitly extract structures of a speech signal, which can then be converted into a new kind of ASR features, referred to as "HMM2 features". In fact, frequency bands with similar characteristics are supposed to be emitted by the same secondary HMM state. The warping along the frequency dimension of speech thus results in an adaptable, data-driven frequency segmentation. In fact, as it can be assumed that different secondary HMM states model spectral regions characterized by high and low energies respectively, this segmentation may be related to formant structures. The application of HMM2 as a feature extractor is investigated, and it is shown that a system combining HMM2 features with conventional noise-robust features yields an improved speech recognition robustness. Moreover, a comparison of HMM2 features with formant tracks shows a comparable performance on a vowel classification task.

EPFL2003

HMM Mixtures (HMM2) for Robust Speech Recognition

Katrin Weber

State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques are typically based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) for the modeling of temporal sequences of feature vectors extracted from the speech signal. At the level of each HMM state, Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) or artificial neural networks (ANNs) are commonly used in order to model the state emission probabilities. However, both GMMs and ANNs are rather rigid, as they are incapable of adapting to variations inherent in the speech signal, such as inter- and intra-speaker variations. Moreover, performance degradations of these systems are severe in the case of unmatched conditions such as in the presence of environmental noise. A lot of research effort is currently being devoted to overcoming these problems. The principal objective of this thesis is to explore new approaches towards a more robust and adaptive modeling of speech. In this context, different aspects of the modeling of speech data with HMMs and GMMs are investigated. Particular attention is given to the modeling of correlation. While correlation between different feature vectors (corresponding to temporal correlation) is typically modeled by the HMM, correlation between feature vector components (e.g., correlation in frequency) is modeled by the GMM part of the model. This thesis starts with the investigation of two potential ways to improve the modeling of correlation, consisting of (1) a shift of the modeling of temporal correlation towards GMMs, and (2) the modeling of correlation within each feature vector by a particular type of HMM. This leads to the development of a novel approach, referred to as ÒHMM2Ó, which is a major focus of this thesis. HMM2 is a particular mixture of hidden Markov models, where state emission probabilities of the temporal (primary) HMM are modeled through (secondary) state-dependent frequency-based HMMs. Low-dimensional GMMs are used for modeling the state emission probabilities of the secondary HMM states. Therefore, HMM2 can be seen as a generalization of conventional HMMs, which they include as a particular case. HMM2 may have several advantages as compared to standard systems. While the primary HMM performs time warping and time integration, the secondary HMM performs warping and integration along the frequency dimension of the speech signal. Frequency correlation is modeled through the secondary HMM topology. Due to the implicit, non-linear, state-dependent spectral warping performed by the secondary HMM, HMM2 may be viewed as a dynamic extension of the multi-band approach. Moreover, this frequency warping property may result in a better, more flexible modeling and parameter sharing. After an investigation of theoretical and practical aspects of HMM2, encouraging recognition results for the case of speech degraded by additive noise are given. Due to the spectral warping property of HMM2, this model is able to extract pertinent structural information of the speech signal, which is reflected in the trained model parameters. Consequently, such an HMM2 system can also be used to explicitly extract structures of a speech signal, which can then be converted into a new kind of ASR features, referred to as ÒHMM2 featuresÓ. In fact, frequency bands with similar characteristics are supposed to be emitted by the same secondary HMM state. The warping along the frequency dimension of speech thus results in an adaptable, data-driven frequency segmentation. In fact, as it can be assumed that different secondary HMM states model spectral regions characterized by high and low energies respectively, this segmentation may be related to formant structures. The application of HMM2 as a feature extractor is investigated, and it is shown that a system combining HMM2 features with conventional noise-robust features yields an improved speech recognition robustness. Moreover, a comparison of HMM2 features with formant tracks shows a comparable performance on a vowel classification task.

Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne2003

HMM Mixtures (HMM2) for Robust Speech Recognition

Katrin Weber

State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques are typically based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) for the modeling of temporal sequences of feature vectors extracted from the speech signal. At the level of each HMM state, Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) or artificial neural networks (ANNs) are commonly used in order to model the state emission probabilities. However, both GMMs and ANNs are rather rigid, as they are incapable of adapting to variations inherent in the speech signal, such as inter- and intra-speaker variations. Moreover, performance degradations of these systems are severe in the case of unmatched conditions such as in the presence of environmental noise. A lot of research effort is currently being devoted to overcoming these problems. The principal objective of this thesis is to explore new approaches towards a more robust and adaptive modeling of speech. In this context, different aspects of the modeling of speech data with HMMs and GMMs are investigated. Particular attention is given to the modeling of correlation. While correlation between different feature vectors (corresponding to temporal correlation) is typically modeled by the HMM, correlation between feature vector components (e.g., correlation in frequency) is modeled by the GMM part of the model. This thesis starts with the investigation of two potential ways to improve the modeling of correlation, consisting of (1) a shift of the modeling of temporal correlation towards GMMs, and (2) the modeling of correlation within each feature vector by a particular type of HMM. This leads to the development of a novel approach, referred to as ÒHMM2Ó, which is a major focus of this thesis. HMM2 is a particular mixture of hidden Markov models, where state emission probabilities of the temporal (primary) HMM are modeled through (secondary) state-dependent frequency-based HMMs. Low-dimensional GMMs are used for modeling the state emission probabilities of the secondary HMM states. Therefore, HMM2 can be seen as a generalization of conventional HMMs, which they include as a particular case. HMM2 may have several advantages as compared to standard systems. While the primary HMM performs time warping and time integration, the secondary HMM performs warping and integration along the frequency dimension of the speech signal. Frequency correlation is modeled through the secondary HMM topology. Due to the implicit, non-linear, state-dependent spectral warping performed by the secondary HMM, HMM2 may be viewed as a dynamic extension of the multi-band approach. Moreover, this frequency warping property may result in a better, more flexible modeling and parameter sharing. After an investigation of theoretical and practical aspects of HMM2, encouraging recognition results for the case of speech degraded by additive noise are given. Due to the spectral warping property of HMM2, this model is able to extract pertinent structural information of the speech signal, which is reflected in the trained model parameters. Consequently, such an HMM2 system can also be used to explicitly extract structures of a speech signal, which can then be converted into a new kind of ASR features, referred to as ÒHMM2 featuresÓ. In fact, frequency bands with similar characteristics are supposed to be emitted by the same secondary HMM state. The warping along the frequency dimension of speech thus results in an adaptable, data-driven frequency segmentation. In fact, as it can be assumed that different secondary HMM states model spectral regions characterized by high and low energies respectively, this segmentation may be related to formant structures. The application of HMM2 as a feature extractor is investigated, and it is shown that a system combining HMM2 features with conventional noise-robust features yields an improved speech recognition robustness. Moreover, a comparison of HMM2 features with formant tracks shows a comparable performance on a vowel classification task.

Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne2003

Language Independent Query by Example Spoken Term Detection

Dhananjay Ram

EPFL2019

HMM mixtures (HMM2) for robust speech recognition

Katrin Weber

EPFL2003