Shahram Ghorbani

Shahram Ghorbani, Yashesh Gaur, Yu Shi et al.

In this study, we try to address the problem of leveraging visual signals to improve Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), also known as visual context-aware ASR (VC-ASR). We explore novel VC-ASR approaches to leverage video and text representations extracted by a self-supervised pre-trained text-video embedding model. Firstly, we propose a multi-stream attention architecture to leverage signals from both audio and video modalities. This architecture consists of separate encoders for the two modalities and a single decoder that attends over them. We show that this architecture is better than fusing modalities at the signal level. Additionally, we also explore leveraging the visual information in a second pass model, which has also been referred to as a `deliberation model'. The deliberation model accepts audio representations and text hypotheses from the first pass ASR and combines them with a visual stream for an improved visual context-aware recognition. The proposed deliberation scheme can work on top of any well trained ASR and also enabled us to leverage the pre-trained text model to ground the hypotheses with the visual features. Our experiments on HOW2 dataset show that multi-stream and deliberation architectures are very effective at the VC-ASR task. We evaluate the proposed models for two scenarios; clean audio stream and distorted audio in which we mask out some specific words in the audio. The deliberation model outperforms the multi-stream model and achieves a relative WER improvement of 6% and 8.7% for the clean and masked data, respectively, compared to an audio-only model. The deliberation model also improves recovering the masked words by 59% relative.

Vinay Kothapally, Wei Xia, Shahram Ghorbani et al.

The reliability of using fully convolutional networks (FCNs) has been successfully demonstrated by recent studies in many speech applications. One of the most popular variants of these FCNs is the `U-Net', which is an encoder-decoder network with skip connections. In this study, we propose `SkipConvNet' where we replace each skip connection with multiple convolutional modules to provide decoder with intuitive feature maps rather than encoder's output to improve the learning capacity of the network. We also propose the use of optimal smoothing of power spectral density (PSD) as a pre-processing step, which helps to further enhance the efficiency of the network. To evaluate our proposed system, we use the REVERB challenge corpus to assess the performance of various enhancement approaches under the same conditions. We focus solely on monitoring improvements in speech quality and their contribution to improving the efficiency of back-end speech systems, such as speech recognition and speaker verification, trained on only clean speech. Experimental findings show that the proposed system consistently outperforms other approaches.

Jianwei Yu, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Jian Wu et al.

Automatic recognition of overlapped speech remains a highly challenging task to date. Motivated by the bimodal nature of human speech perception, this paper investigates the use of audio-visual technologies for overlapped speech recognition. Three issues associated with the construction of audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) systems are addressed. First, the basic architecture designs i.e. end-to-end and hybrid of AVSR systems are investigated. Second, purposefully designed modality fusion gates are used to robustly integrate the audio and visual features. Third, in contrast to a traditional pipelined architecture containing explicit speech separation and recognition components, a streamlined and integrated AVSR system optimized consistently using the lattice-free MMI (LF-MMI) discriminative criterion is also proposed. The proposed LF-MMI time-delay neural network (TDNN) system establishes the state-of-the-art for the LRS2 dataset. Experiments on overlapped speech simulated from the LRS2 dataset suggest the proposed AVSR system outperformed the audio only baseline LF-MMI DNN system by up to 29.98\% absolute in word error rate (WER) reduction, and produced recognition performance comparable to a more complex pipelined system. Consistent performance improvements of 4.89\% absolute in WER reduction over the baseline AVSR system using feature fusion are also obtained.

Shahram Ghorbani, Soheil Khorram, John H. L. Hansen

Training acoustic models with sequentially incoming data -- while both leveraging new data and avoiding the forgetting effect-- is an essential obstacle to achieving human intelligence level in speech recognition. An obvious approach to leverage data from a new domain (e.g., new accented speech) is to first generate a comprehensive dataset of all domains, by combining all available data, and then use this dataset to retrain the acoustic models. However, as the amount of training data grows, storing and retraining on such a large-scale dataset becomes practically impossible. To deal with this problem, in this study, we study several domain expansion techniques which exploit only the data of the new domain to build a stronger model for all domains. These techniques are aimed at learning the new domain with a minimal forgetting effect (i.e., they maintain original model performance). These techniques modify the adaptation procedure by imposing new constraints including (1) weight constraint adaptation (WCA): keeping the model parameters close to the original model parameters; (2) elastic weight consolidation (EWC): slowing down training for parameters that are important for previously established domains; (3) soft KL-divergence (SKLD): restricting the KL-divergence between the original and the adapted model output distributions; and (4) hybrid SKLD-EWC: incorporating both SKLD and EWC constraints. We evaluate these techniques in an accent adaptation task in which we adapt a deep neural network (DNN) acoustic model trained with native English to three different English accents: Australian, Hispanic, and Indian. The experimental results show that SKLD significantly outperforms EWC, and EWC works better than WCA. The hybrid SKLD-EWC technique results in the best overall performance.