Dongyan Huang

Weiquan Fan, Xiangmin Xu, Xiaofen Xing et al.

Speech emotion recognition is a vital contributor to the next generation of human-computer interaction (HCI). However, current existing small-scale databases have limited the development of related research. In this paper, we present LSSED, a challenging large-scale english speech emotion dataset, which has data collected from 820 subjects to simulate real-world distribution. In addition, we release some pre-trained models based on LSSED, which can not only promote the development of speech emotion recognition, but can also be transferred to related downstream tasks such as mental health analysis where data is extremely difficult to collect. Finally, our experiments show the necessity of large-scale datasets and the effectiveness of pre-trained models. The dateset will be released on https://github.com/tobefans/LSSED.

Yihui Fu, Zhuoyuan Yao, Weipeng He et al.

The IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) 2021 Alpha-mini Speech Challenge (ASC) is intended to improve research on keyword spotting (KWS) and sound source location (SSL) on humanoid robots. Many publications report significant improvements in deep learning based KWS and SSL on open source datasets in recent years. For deep learning model training, it is necessary to expand the data coverage to improve the robustness of model. Thus, simulating multi-channel noisy and reverberant data from single-channel speech, noise, echo and room impulsive response (RIR) is widely adopted. However, this approach may generate mismatch between simulated data and recorded data in real application scenarios, especially echo data. In this challenge, we open source a sizable speech, keyword, echo and noise corpus for promoting data-driven methods, particularly deep-learning approaches on KWS and SSL. We also choose Alpha-mini, a humanoid robot produced by UBTECH equipped with a built-in four-microphone array on its head, to record development and evaluation sets under the actual Alpha-mini robot application scenario, including noise as well as echo and mechanical noise generated by the robot itself for model evaluation. Furthermore, we illustrate the rules, evaluation methods and baselines for researchers to quickly assess their achievements and optimize their models.

Shan Yang, Lei Xie, Xiao Chen et al.

In this paper, we aim at improving the performance of synthesized speech in statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) based on a generative adversarial network (GAN). In particular, we propose a novel architecture combining the traditional acoustic loss function and the GAN's discriminative loss under a multi-task learning (MTL) framework. The mean squared error (MSE) is usually used to estimate the parameters of deep neural networks, which only considers the numerical difference between the raw audio and the synthesized one. To mitigate this problem, we introduce the GAN as a second task to determine if the input is a natural speech with specific conditions. In this MTL framework, the MSE optimization improves the stability of GAN, and at the same time GAN produces samples with a distribution closer to natural speech. Listening tests show that the multi-task architecture can generate more natural speech that satisfies human perception than the conventional methods.