Technical Program

Paper Detail

Presentation #1
Session:Spoken Language Understanding
Location:Kallirhoe Hall
Session Time:Wednesday, December 19, 10:00 - 12:00
Presentation Time:Wednesday, December 19, 10:00 - 12:00
Presentation: Poster
Topic: Spoken language understanding:
Paper Title: LOW-RESOURCE CONTEXTUAL TOPIC IDENTIFICATION ON SPEECH
Authors: Chunxi Liu, Matthew Wiesner, Shinji Watanabe, Craig Harman, Jan Trmal, Najim Dehak, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Johns Hopkins University, United States
Abstract: In topic identification (topic ID) on real-world unstructured audio, an audio instance of variable topic shifts is first broken into sequential segments, and each segment is independently classified. We first present a general purpose method for topic ID on spoken segments in low-resource languages, using a cascade of universal acoustic modeling, translation lexicons to English, and English-language topic classification. Next, instead of classifying each segment independently, we demonstrate that exploring the contextual dependencies across sequential segments can provide large improvements. In particular, we propose an attention-based contextual model which is able to leverage the contexts in a selective manner. We test both our contextual and non-contextual models on four LORELEI languages, and on all but one our attention-based contextual model significantly outperforms the context-independent models.