Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

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.

/pdf/deep-learning-methods-and-applications-5cyi610sjz.pdf

Deep Learning: Methods and Applications

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

http://cs.uef.fi/sipu/pub/SRE-review-Kinnunen-and-Li.pdf

An overview of text-independent speaker recognition: From features to supervectors

The objective of this paper is speaker recognition under noisy and unconstrained conditions. 
We make two key contributions. First, we introduce a very large-scale audio-visual speaker recognition dataset collected from open-source media. Using a fully automated pipeline, we curate VoxCeleb2 which contains over a million utterances from over 6,000 speakers. This is several times larger than any publicly available speaker recognition dataset. 
Second, we develop and compare Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and training strategies that can effectively recognise identities from voice under various conditions. The models trained on the VoxCeleb2 dataset surpass the performance of previous works on a benchmark dataset by a significant margin.

VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00499180/document

Automatic speech recognition and speech variability: A review

Linear hidden transformations for adaptation of hybrid ANN/HMM models

The paper presents a fast segmental Viterbi algorithm. A new search strategy particularly effective for very large vocabulary word recognition. It performs a tree based, time synchronous, left-to-right beam search that develops time-dependent acoustic and phonetic hypotheses. At any given time, it makes active a sub-word unit associated to an arc of a lexical tree only if that time is likely to be the boundary between the current and the next unit. This new technique, tested with a vocabulary of 188892 directory entries, achieves the same results obtained with the Viterbi algorithm, with a 35% speedup. Results are also presented for a 718 word, speaker independent continuous speech recognition task.

A fast segmental Viterbi algorithm for large vocabulary recognition

This work presents a new and efficient approach to discriminative speaker verification in the i-vector space. We illustrate the development of a linear discriminative classifier that is trained to discriminate between the hypothesis that a pair of feature vectors in a trial belong to the same speaker or to different speakers. This approach is alternative to the usual discriminative setup that discriminates between a speaker and all the other speakers. We use a discriminative classifier based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) that is trained to estimate the parameters of a symmetric quadratic function approximating a log-likelihood ratio score without explicit modeling of the i-vector distributions as in the generative Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) models. Training these models is feasible because it is not necessary to expand the i -vector pairs, which would be expensive or even impossible even for medium sized training sets. The results of experiments performed on the tel-tel extended core condition of the NIST 2010 Speaker Recognition Evaluation are competitive with the ones obtained by generative models, in terms of normalized Detection Cost Function and Equal Error Rate. Moreover, we show that it is possible to train a gender-independent discriminative model that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, comparable to the one of a gender-dependent system, saving memory and execution time both in training and in testing.

/pdf/pairwise-discriminative-speaker-verification-in-the-rm-i-39sjyis62v.pdf

Pairwise Discriminative Speaker Verification in the ${\rm I}$ -Vector Space

This paper presents a stream-based approach for unsupervised multi-speaker conversational speech segmentation. The main idea of this work is to exploit prior knowledge about the speaker space to find a low dimensional vector of speaker factors that summarize the salient speaker characteristics. This new approach produces segmentation error rates that are better than the state of the art ones reported in our previous work on the segmentation task in the NIST 2000 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). We also show how the performance of a speaker recognition system in the core test of the 2006 NIST SRE is affected, comparing the results obtained using single speaker and automatically segmented test data.

Pietro Laface

Papers

Automatic speech recognition and speech variability: A review

Linear hidden transformations for adaptation of hybrid ANN/HMM models

A fast segmental Viterbi algorithm for large vocabulary recognition

Pairwise Discriminative Speaker Verification in the ${\rm I}$ -Vector Space

Stream-based speaker segmentation using speaker factors and eigenvoices