Jinsong Zhang

Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Fei Li et al.

The rapid development of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) within recent decades shows great potential for real-world society. The current ABSA works, however, are mostly limited to the scenario of a single text piece, leaving the study in dialogue contexts unexplored. To bridge the gap between fine-grained sentiment analysis and conversational opinion mining, in this work, we introduce a novel task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis, namely DiaASQ, aiming to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. We manually construct a large-scale high-quality DiaASQ dataset in both Chinese and English languages. We deliberately develop a neural model to benchmark the task, which advances in effectively performing end-to-end quadruple prediction, and manages to incorporate rich dialogue-specific and discourse feature representations for better cross-utterance quadruple extraction. We hope the new benchmark will spur more advancements in the sentiment analysis community.

Jinsong Zhang, Minjie Zhu, Yuxiang Zhang et al.

This paper addresses the problem of generating whole-body motion from speech. Despite great successes, prior methods still struggle to produce reasonable and diverse whole-body motions from speech. This is due to their reliance on suboptimal representations and a lack of strategies for generating diverse results. To address these challenges, we present a novel hybrid point representation to achieve accurate and continuous motion generation, e.g., avoiding foot skating, and this representation can be transformed into an easy-to-use representation, i.e., SMPL-X body mesh, for many applications. To generate whole-body motion from speech, for facial motion, closely tied to the audio signal, we introduce an encoder-decoder architecture to achieve deterministic outcomes. However, for the body and hands, which have weaker connections to the audio signal, we aim to generate diverse yet reasonable motions. To boost diversity in motion generation, we propose a contrastive motion learning method to encourage the model to produce more distinctive representations. Specifically, we design a robust VQ-VAE to learn a quantized motion codebook using our hybrid representation. Then, we regress the motion representation from the audio signal by a translation model employing our contrastive motion learning method. Experimental results validate the superior performance and the correctness of our model. The project page is available for research purposes at http://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/SpeechAct.

Linkai Peng, Yingming Gao, Binghuai Lin et al.

Mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) technology is a key component of computer-assisted pronunciation training system (CAPT). In the field of assessing the pronunciation quality of constrained speech, the given transcriptions can play the role of a teacher. Conventional methods have fully utilized the prior texts for the model construction or improving the system performance, e.g. forced-alignment and extended recognition networks. Recently, some end-to-end based methods attempt to incorporate the prior texts into model training and preliminarily show the effectiveness. However, previous studies mostly consider applying raw attention mechanism to fuse audio representations with text representations, without taking possible text-pronunciation mismatch into account. In this paper, we present a gating strategy that assigns more importance to the relevant audio features while suppressing irrelevant text information. Moreover, given the transcriptions, we design an extra contrastive loss to reduce the gap between the learning objective of phoneme recognition and MDD. We conducted experiments using two publicly available datasets (TIMIT and L2-Arctic) and our best model improved the F1 score from $57.51\%$ to $61.75\%$ compared to the baselines. Besides, we provide a detailed analysis to shed light on the effectiveness of gating mechanism and contrastive learning on MDD.

Yuqi Shi, Hao Yang, Xiyao Lu et al.

While second language (L2) learners may acquire target syntactic word order, mapping this syntax onto appropriate prosodic structures remains a persistent challenge. This study investigates the fossilization and stability of the L2 syntax-prosody interface by comparing 67 native Mandarin speakers with 67 Vietnamese learners using the BLCU-SAIT corpus. By integrating C-ToBI boundary annotation with Dependency Grammar analysis, we examined both the quantity of prosodic boundaries and their mapping to syntactic relations. Results reveal a non-linear acquisition: although high-proficiency learners (VNH) converge to the native baseline in boundary quantity at the Major Phrase level (B3), their structural mapping significantly diverges. Specifically, VNH demote the prosodic boundary at the Subject-Verb (SBV) interface (Major Phrase B3 -> Prosodic Word B1), while erroneously promoting the boundary at the Verb-Object (VOB) interface (Prosodic Word B1 -> Major Phrase B3). This strategy allows learners to maintain high long phrasal output at the expense of structural accuracy. This results in a distorted prosodic hierarchy where the native pattern is inverted.

Huahuan Zheng, Wenjie Peng, Zhijian Ou et al.

Automatic speech recognition systems have been largely improved in the past few decades and current systems are mainly hybrid-based and end-to-end-based. The recently proposed CTC-CRF framework inherits the data-efficiency of the hybrid approach and the simplicity of the end-to-end approach. In this paper, we further advance CTC-CRF based ASR technique with explorations on modeling units and neural architectures. Specifically, we investigate techniques to enable the recently developed wordpiece modeling units and Conformer neural networks to be succesfully applied in CTC-CRFs. Experiments are conducted on two English datasets (Switchboard, Librispeech) and a German dataset from CommonVoice. Experimental results suggest that (i) Conformer can improve the recognition performance significantly; (ii) Wordpiece-based systems perform slightly worse compared with phone-based systems for the target language with a low degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence (e.g. English), while the two systems can perform equally strong when such degree of correspondence is high for the target language (e.g. German).

Dengfeng Ke, Jinsong Zhang, Yanlu Xie et al.

Single channel speech enhancement is a challenging task in speech community. Recently, various neural networks based methods have been applied to speech enhancement. Among these models, PHASEN and T-GSA achieve state-of-the-art performances on the publicly opened VoiceBank+DEMAND corpus. Both of the models reach the COVL score of 3.62. PHASEN achieves the highest CSIG score of 4.21 while T-GSA gets the highest PESQ score of 3.06. However, both of these two models are very large. The contradiction between the model performance and the model size is hard to reconcile. In this paper, we introduce three kinds of techniques to shrink the PHASEN model and improve the performance. Firstly, seperable polling attention is proposed to replace the frequency transformation blocks in PHASEN. Secondly, global layer normalization followed with PReLU is used to replace batch normalization followed with ReLU. Finally, BLSTM in PHASEN is replaced with Conv2d operation and the phase stream is simplified. With all these modifications, the size of the PHASEN model is shrunk from 33M parameters to 5M parameters, while the performance on VoiceBank+DEMAND is improved to the CSIG score of 4.30, the PESQ score of 3.07 and the COVL score of 3.73.

Kaiqi Fu, Jones Lin, Dengfeng Ke et al.

Recently, end-to-end mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MD&D) systems has become a popular alternative to greatly simplify the model-building process of conventional hybrid DNN-HMM systems by representing complicated modules with a single deep network architecture. In this paper, in order to utilize the prior text in the end-to-end structure, we present a novel text-dependent model which is difference with sed-mdd, the model achieves a fully end-to-end system by aligning the audio with the phoneme sequences of the prior text inside the model through the attention mechanism. Moreover, the prior text as input will be a problem of imbalance between positive and negative samples in the phoneme sequence. To alleviate this problem, we propose three simple data augmentation methods, which effectively improve the ability of model to capture mispronounced phonemes. We conduct experiments on L2-ARCTIC, and our best performance improved from 49.29% to 56.08% in F-measure metric compared to the CNN-RNN-CTC model.

Wang Dai, Jinsong Zhang, Yingming Gao et al.

Formant tracking is one of the most fundamental problems in speech processing. Traditionally, formants are estimated using signal processing methods. Recent studies showed that generic convolutional architectures can outperform recurrent networks on temporal tasks such as speech synthesis and machine translation. In this paper, we explored the use of Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) for formant tracking. In addition to the conventional implementation, we modified the architecture from three aspects. First, we turned off the "causal" mode of dilated convolution, making the dilated convolution see the future speech frames. Second, each hidden layer reused the output information from all the previous layers through dense connection. Third, we also adopted a gating mechanism to alleviate the problem of gradient disappearance by selectively forgetting unimportant information. The model was validated on the open access formant database VTR. The experiment showed that our proposed model was easy to converge and achieved an overall mean absolute percent error (MAPE) of 8.2% on speech-labeled frames, compared to three competitive baselines of 9.4% (LSTM), 9.1% (Bi-LSTM) and 8.9% (TCN).