Yeon-Jun Kim

Karan Singla, Daniel Pressel, Ryan Price et al. · amazon-science

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for multi-modal speech and text input. We combine pretrained speech and text encoders using multi-headed cross-modal attention and jointly fine-tune on the target problem. The resultant architecture can be used for continuous token-level classification or utterance-level prediction acting on simultaneous text and speech. The resultant encoder efficiently captures both acoustic-prosodic and lexical information. We compare the benefits of multi-headed attention-based fusion for multi-modal utterance-level classification against a simple concatenation of pre-pooled, modality-specific representations. Our model architecture is compact, resource efficient, and can be trained on a single consumer GPU card.

Karan Singla, Yeon-Jun Kim, Srinivas Bangalore

In human-computer conversations, extracting entities such as names, street addresses and email addresses from speech is a challenging task. In this paper, we study the impact of fine-tuning pre-trained speech encoders on extracting spoken entities in human-readable form directly from speech without the need for text transcription. We illustrate that such a direct approach optimizes the encoder to transcribe only the entity relevant portions of speech ignoring the superfluous portions such as carrier phrases, or spell name entities. In the context of dialog from an enterprise virtual agent, we demonstrate that the 1-step approach outperforms the typical 2-step approach which first generates lexical transcriptions followed by text-based entity extraction for identifying spoken entities.

Karan Singla, Shahab Jalalvand, Yeon-Jun Kim et al.

Person name capture from human speech is a difficult task in human-machine conversations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to capture the person names from the caller utterances in response to the prompt "say and spell your first/last name". Inspired from work on spell correction, disfluency removal and text normalization, we propose a lightweight Seq-2-Seq system which generates a name spell from a varying user input. Our proposed method outperforms the strong baseline which is based on LM-driven rule-based approach.