Speech Acoustic Modelling using Raw Source and Filter Components
(3 minutes introduction)
| Erfan Loweimi (University of Edinburgh, UK), Zoran Cvetkovic (King’s College London, UK), Peter Bell (University of Edinburgh, UK), Steve Renals (University of Edinburgh, UK) |
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Source-filter modelling is among the fundamental techniques in speech processing with a wide range of applications. In acoustic modelling, features such as MFCC and PLP which parametrise the filter component are widely employed. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of building acoustic models from the raw filter and source components. The raw magnitude spectrum, as the primary information stream, is decomposed into the excitation and vocal tract information streams via cepstral liftering. Then, acoustic models are built via multi-head CNNs which, among others, allow for processing each individual stream via a sequence of bespoke transforms and fusing them at an optimal level of abstraction. We discuss the possible advantages of such information factorisation and recombination, investigate the dynamics of these models and explore the optimal fusion level. Furthermore, we illustrate the CNN’s learned filters and provide some interpretation for the captured patterns. The proposed approach with optimal fusion scheme results in up to 14% and 7% relative WER reduction in WSJ and Aurora-4 tasks.
