[Colloquium] REMINDER: 7/17 TTIC Colloquium: Sharon Goldwater; Univ. of Edinburgh (NOTE UNUSUAL DAY)

[Mary Marre]

When:     Friday, July 17th at 11:00 a.m. (note unusual day)

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:       Sharon Goldwater; University of Edinburgh

Title: Unsupervised Word Segmentation and Lexicon Discovery from
Speech using Acoustic Word Embeddings

Abstract:
The current generation of automatic speech recognition systems has
been commercially successful in applications ranging from dictation
software to speech interfaces for mobile devices. Yet, with current
supervised techniques, developing a high quality system for a new
language requires hundreds of hours of transcribed speech and
sometimes also a large expert-produced pronunciation dictionary. While
possible for some languages, this approach is untenable if we hope to
develop speech technology for most of the 7000 languages in the world
(including systems that might help to document the many endangered
languages).

This talk describes our initial work on developing *unsupervised*
speech technology, where the learning is more analogous to what human
infants do: from speech audio alone, the system must learn to segment
the speech stream into word tokens and cluster repeated instances of
the same word together to learn a lexicon of vocabulary items.  Our
probabilistic approach combines ideas originally developed for
cognitive modelling
of human language acquisition with those from speech technology and
machine learning. I will present our early results on a
small-vocabulary English corpus (TIDIGITS) and discuss some of the
challenges we will face in scaling up the system.  I aim to make the
talk accessible to listeners without much background in speech
recognition.

*Host*:  Karen Livescu








Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 504*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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