Abstract
Unsupervised discovery of sub-lexical units in speech is a problem that currently interests speech researchers. In this paper, we report experiments in which we use phone segmentation followed by clustering the segments together using k-means and a Convolutional Neural Network. We thus obtain an annotation of the corpus in pseudo-phones, which then allows us to find pseudo-words. We compare the results for two different segmentations: manual and automatic. To check the portability of our approach, we compare the results for three different languages (English, French and Xitsonga). The originality of our work lies in the use of neural networks in an unsupervised way that differ from the common method for unsupervised speech unit discovery based on auto-encoders. With the Xitsonga corpus, for instance, with manual and automatic segmentations, we were able to obtain 46% and 42% purity scores, respectively, at phone-level with 30 pseudo-phones. Based on the inferred pseudo-phones, we discovered about 200 pseudo-words.
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Manenti, C., Pellegrini, T., Pinquier, J. (2017). Unsupervised Speech Unit Discovery Using K-means and Neural Networks. In: Camelin, N., Estève, Y., Martín-Vide, C. (eds) Statistical Language and Speech Processing. SLSP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10583. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68456-7_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68456-7_14
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