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EACL 20242024Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a number of natural language processing tasks, such as question answering and text summarization. However, their performance on sequence labeling tasks, such as intent classification and slot filling (IC-SF), which is a central component in personal assistant systems, lags significantly behind discriminative models. Furthermore, there
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2024Modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are evaluated with respect to Word Error Rate (WER). While WER is a useful metric for training and evaluation of speech models, it does not fully reflect the difference in semantics between predicted and ground truth transcriptions. In conversational voice assistants, the ability to sufficiently understand the semantic meaning of the user request is often
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EACL 20242024We present ParrotTTS, a modularized text-to-speech synthesis model leveraging disentangled self-supervised speech representations. It can train a multi-speaker variant effectively using transcripts from a single speaker. ParrotTTS adapts to a new language in low resource setup and generalizes to languages not seen while training the self-supervised back-bone. Moreover, without training on bilingual or parallel
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2024We propose an approach for continuous prediction of turn-taking and backchanneling locations in spoken dialogue by fusing a neural acoustic model with a large language model (LLM). Experiments on the Switchboard human-human conversation dataset demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms the baseline models with single modality. We also develop a novel multi-task instruction fine- tuning strategy
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EMNLP 20232024Analogy-making between narratives is crucial for human reasoning. In this paper, we evaluate the ability to identify and generate analogies by constructing a first-of-its-kind large-scale story-level analogy corpus, STORYANALOGY, which contains 24K story pairs from diverse domains with human annotations on two similarities from the extended Structure-Mapping Theory. We design a set of tests on STORYANALOGY
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April 11, 2019Multiband dynamics processing, which separately modifies volume in different frequency bands of an audio signal, is known to improve listeners’ audio experiences. But in the context of voice-controlled systems like the Amazon Echo family of products, it can also improve automatic speech recognition by making echo cancellation easier. -
April 8, 2019Transfer learning is the technique of adapting a machine learning model trained on abundant data to a new context in which training data is sparse. On the Alexa team, we’ve explored transfer learning as a way to bootstrap new functions and to add new classification categories to existing machine learning systems.
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April 4, 2019Customer interactions with Alexa are constantly growing more complex, and on the Alexa science team, we strive to stay ahead of the curve by continuously improving Alexa’s speech recognition system. Increasingly, keeping pace with Alexa’s expanding capabilities will require automating the learning process, through techniques such as semi-supervised learning, which leverages a small amount of annotated data to extract information from a much larger store of unannotated data.
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April 1, 2019The idea of using arrays of microphones to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) is decades old. The acoustic signal generated by a sound source reaches multiple microphones with different time delays. This information can be used to create virtual directivity, emphasizing a sound arriving from a direction of interest and diminishing signals coming from other directions. In voice recognition, one of the more popular methods for doing this is known as “beamforming”.
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Animation by Nick LittleMarch 28, 2019Audio watermarking is the process of adding a distinctive sound pattern — undetectable to the human ear — to an audio signal to make it identifiable to a computer. It’s one of the ways that video sites recognize copyrighted recordings that have been posted illegally. To identify a watermark, a computer usually converts a digital file into an audio signal, which it processes internally.
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March 21, 2019Sentiment analysis is the attempt, computationally, to determine from someone’s words how he or she feels about something. It has a host of applications, in market research, media analysis, customer service, and product recommendation, among other things. Sentiment classifiers are typically machine learning systems, and any given application of sentiment analysis may suffer from a lack of annotated data for training purposes.
