Deep learning is a form of machine learning that enables computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts. Because the computer gathers knowledge from experience, there is no need for a human computer operator to formally specify all the knowledge that the computer needs. The hierarchy of concepts allows the computer to learn complicated concepts by building them out of simpler ones; a graph of these hierarchies would be many layers deep. This book introduces a broad range of topics in deep learning. The text offers mathematical and conceptual background, covering relevant concepts in linear algebra, probability theory and information theory, numerical computation, and machine learning. It describes deep learning techniques used by practitioners in industry, including deep feedforward networks, regularization, optimization algorithms, convolutional networks, sequence modeling, and practical methodology; and it surveys such applications as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, online recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and videogames. Finally, the book offers research perspectives, covering such theoretical topics as linear factor models, autoencoders, representation learning, structured probabilistic models, Monte Carlo methods, the partition function, approximate inference, and deep generative models. Deep Learning can be used by undergraduate or graduate students planning careers in either industry or research, and by software engineers who want to begin using deep learning in their products or platforms. A website offers supplementary material for both readers and instructors.

Deep Learning

https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~turnbull/cs97/f09/paper/reynolds00.pdf

Speaker Verification Using Adapted Gaussian Mixture Models

This paper introduces and motivates the use of Gaussian mixture models (GMM) for robust text-independent speaker identification. The individual Gaussian components of a GMM are shown to represent some general speaker-dependent spectral shapes that are effective for modeling speaker identity. The focus of this work is on applications which require high identification rates using short utterance from unconstrained conversational speech and robustness to degradations produced by transmission over a telephone channel. A complete experimental evaluation of the Gaussian mixture speaker model is conducted on a 49 speaker, conversational telephone speech database. The experiments examine algorithmic issues (initialization, variance limiting, model order selection), spectral variability robustness techniques, large population performance, and comparisons to other speaker modeling techniques (uni-modal Gaussian, VQ codebook, tied Gaussian mixture, and radial basis functions). The Gaussian mixture speaker model attains 96.8% identification accuracy using 5 second clean speech utterances and 80.8% accuracy using 15 second telephone speech utterances with a 49 speaker population and is shown to outperform the other speaker modeling techniques on an identical 16 speaker telephone speech task. >

Robust text-independent speaker identification using Gaussian mixture speaker models

The PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge

This monograph provides an overview of general deep learning methodology and its applications to a variety of signal and information processing tasks. The application areas are chosen with the following three criteria in mind: (1) expertise or knowledge of the authors; (2) the application areas that have already been transformed by the successful use of deep learning technology, such as speech recognition and computer vision; and (3) the application areas that have the potential to be impacted significantly by deep learning and that have been experiencing research growth, including natural language and text processing, information retrieval, and multimodal information processing empowered by multi-task deep learning.

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Deep Learning: Methods and Applications

Latent semantic models, such as LSA, intend to map a query to its relevant documents at the semantic level where keyword-based matching often fails In this study we strive to develop a series of new latent semantic models with a deep structure that project queries and documents into a common low-dimensional space where the relevance of a document given a query is readily computed as the distance between them The proposed deep structured semantic models are discriminatively trained by maximizing the conditional likelihood of the clicked documents given a query using the clickthrough data To make our models applicable to large-scale Web search applications, we also use a technique called word hashing, which is shown to effectively scale up our semantic models to handle large vocabularies which are common in such tasks The new models are evaluated on a Web document ranking task using a real-world data set Results show that our best model significantly outperforms other latent semantic models, which were considered state-of-the-art in the performance prior to the work presented in this paper

/pdf/learning-deep-structured-semantic-models-for-web-search-3ouh9c4skm.pdf

Learning deep structured semantic models for web search using clickthrough data

Semantic slot filling is one of the most challenging problems in spoken language understanding (SLU). In this paper, we propose to use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for this task, and present several novel architectures designed to efficiently model past and future temporal dependencies. Specifically, we implemented and compared several important RNN architectures, including Elman, Jordan, and hybrid variants. To facilitate reproducibility, we implemented these networks with the publicly available Theano neural network toolkit and completed experiments on the well-known airline travel information system (ATIS) benchmark. In addition, we compared the approaches on two custom SLU data sets from the entertainment and movies domains. Our results show that the RNN-based models outperform the conditional random field (CRF) baseline by 2% in absolute error reduction on the ATIS benchmark. We improve the state-of-the-art by 0.5% in the Entertainment domain, and 6.7% for the movies domain.

/pdf/using-recurrent-neural-networks-for-slot-filling-in-spoken-zott3hqein.pdf

Using recurrent neural networks for slot filling in spoken language understanding

One of the main data resources used in many studies over the past two decades for spoken language understanding (SLU) research in spoken dialog systems is the airline travel information system (ATIS) corpus. Two primary tasks in SLU are intent determination (ID) and slot filling (SF). Recent studies reported error rates below 5% for both of these tasks employing discriminative machine learning techniques with the ATIS test set. While these low error rates may suggest that this task is close to being solved, further analysis reveals the continued utility of ATIS as a research corpus. In this paper, our goal is not experimenting with domain specific techniques or features which can help with the remaining SLU errors, but instead exploring methods to realize this utility via extensive error analysis. We conclude that even with such low error rates, ATIS test set still includes many unseen example categories and sequences, hence requires more data. Better yet, new annotated larger data sets from more complex tasks with realistic utterances can avoid over-tuning in terms of modeling and feature design. We believe that advancements in SLU can be achieved by having more naturally spoken data sets and employing more linguistically motivated features while preserving robustness due to speech recognition noise and variance due to natural language.

/pdf/what-is-left-to-be-understood-in-atis-1fxj7tptbs.pdf

What is left to be understood in ATIS

We are happy to announce the release of the MSR Identity Toolbox: A MATLAB toolbox for speaker-recognition research. This toolbox contains a collection of MATLAB tools and routines that can be used for research and development in speaker recognition. It provides researchers with a test bed for developing new front-end and back-end techniques, allowing replicable evaluation of new advancements. It will also help newcomers in the field by lowering the "barrier to entry," enabling them to quickly build baseline systems for their experiments. Although the focus of this toolbox is on speaker recognition, it can also be used for other speech related applications such as language, dialect, and accent identification. Additionally, it provides many of the functionalities available in other open-source speaker recognition toolkits (e.g., ALIZE

/pdf/msr-identity-toolbox-v1-0-a-matlab-toolbox-for-speaker-4cwsyhxoi2.pdf

MSR Identity Toolbox v1.0: A MATLAB Toolbox for Speaker Recognition Research

Documents exhibit sequential structure at multiple levels of abstraction (e.g., sentences, paragraphs, sections). These abstractions constitute a natural hierarchy for representing the context in which to infer the meaning of words and larger fragments of text. In this paper, we present CLSTM (Contextual LSTM), an extension of the recurrent neural network LSTM (Long-Short Term Memory) model, where we incorporate contextual features (e.g., topics) into the model. We evaluate CLSTM on three specific NLP tasks: word prediction, next sentence selection, and sentence topic prediction. Results from experiments run on two corpora, English documents in Wikipedia and a subset of articles from a recent snapshot of English Google News, indicate that using both words and topics as features improves performance of the CLSTM models over baseline LSTM models for these tasks. For example on the next sentence selection task, we get relative accuracy improvements of 21% for the Wikipedia dataset and 18% for the Google News dataset. This clearly demonstrates the significant benefit of using context appropriately in natural language (NL) tasks. This has implications for a wide variety of NL applications like question answering, sentence completion, paraphrase generation, and next utterance prediction in dialog systems.

Larry Heck

Papers

Learning deep structured semantic models for web search using clickthrough data

Using recurrent neural networks for slot filling in spoken language understanding

What is left to be understood in ATIS

MSR Identity Toolbox v1.0: A MATLAB Toolbox for Speaker Recognition Research

Contextual LSTM (CLSTM) models for Large scale NLP tasks.