Modeling phones, keywords, topics and intents in spoken languages

Chen, Wenda

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/105767 Copy

Description

Title

Modeling phones, keywords, topics and intents in spoken languages

Author(s)

Chen, Wenda

Issue Date

2019-07-02

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark

Committee Member(s)

• Li, Haizhou
• Levinson, Stephen E.
• Varshney, Lav R.

Department of Study

Electrical & Computer Eng

Discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Speech recognition
• Low-resource languages
• Transfer learning
• Clustering
• Distant Supervision, Spoken language understanding
• Spoken term detection

Abstract

Spoken Language Understanding for both rich-resource languages (RRL) and low-resource languages (LRL) is an important research area for academia and the commercial world. In the conversational situations where either the language used in speech is a minority one, or the environment is noisy, barriers will emerge between the communicators. Essentially, people would like to understand the basic components of any language spoken by others who they meet in their daily lives. On the other hand, machines can also be trained to learn the process of modeling the basic language components such as phones, keywords, topics and intents during both human/machine interactions and human/human communications. Eventually, if we can develop a machine assistant for people to understand the basic meaning of any language in speech, we could make the human world much more efficient and harmonious. This thesis addresses the problem with the help of mismatched-crowdsourcing- based distant supervision, linguistic knowledge, and corpus-based transfer learning. First we analyze the usefulness of mismatched transcripts and distinctive features, and then propose phone recognition based on the optimized inference of the phone set in the low-resource language from the clustering of the mismatched transcripts. Subsequently, the keyword discovery from the phone-level results is explored. The topic information collected in the corpus is then used as the additional knowledge for topic classification and further improving phone recognition. Based on the keyword sequence, the intents of the speaker are also eventually obtained. The experimental results show that with the help of data collection design and existing knowledge, we can achieve reasonably good machine language understanding for languages whose phones, keywords, topics, and intents were not learned before. This work will lead to further investigations in the area of spoken language understanding in any language.

Graduation Semester

2019-08

Type of Resource

text

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Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2019 Wenda Chen

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