由自我发项层组成的大型，预训练的神经网络（变形金刚）最近在几种语音情绪识别（SER）数据集上取得了最新的结果。这些模型通常以自我监督的方式进行预训练，以提高自动语音识别性能，从而了解语言信息。在这项工作中，我们研究了在Ser微调过程中利用此信息的程度。使用基于开源工具的可重现方法，我们在改变文本的情感时综合了韵律中性的语音话语。变压器模型的价预测对正面和负面情绪含量以及否定性非常反应，但对增强剂或还原器不反应，而这些语言特征都没有影响唤醒或优势。这些发现表明，变形金刚可以成功利用语言信息来改善其价预测，并且应将语言分析包括在其测试中。

Self-supervised speech models have grown fast during the past few years and have proven feasible for use in various downstream tasks. Some recent work has started to look at the characteristics of these models, yet many concerns have not been fully addressed. In this work, we conduct a study on emotional corpora to explore a popular self-supervised model -- wav2vec 2.0. Via a set of quantitative analysis, we mainly demonstrate that: 1) wav2vec 2.0 appears to discard paralinguistic information that is less useful for word recognition purposes; 2) for emotion recognition, representations from the middle layer alone perform as well as those derived from layer averaging, while the final layer results in the worst performance in some cases; 3) current self-supervised models may not be the optimal solution for downstream tasks that make use of non-lexical features. Our work provides novel findings that will aid future research in this area and theoretical basis for the use of existing models.

Recently proposed self-supervised learning approaches have been successful for pre-training speech representation models. The utility of these learned representations has been observed empirically, but not much has been studied about the type or extent of information encoded in the pre-trained representations themselves. Developing such insights can help understand the capabilities and limits of these models and enable the research community to more efficiently develop their usage for downstream applications. In this work, we begin to fill this gap by examining one recent and successful pre-trained model (wav2vec 2.0), via its intermediate representation vectors, using a suite of analysis tools. We use the metrics of canonical correlation, mutual information, and performance on simple downstream tasks with non-parametric probes, in order to (i) query for acoustic and linguistic information content, (ii) characterize the evolution of information across model layers, and (iii) understand how fine-tuning the model for automatic speech recognition (ASR) affects these observations. Our findings motivate modifying the fine-tuning protocol for ASR, which produces improved word error rates in a low-resource setting.

Many self-supervised speech models, varying in their pre-training objective, input modality, and pre-training data, have been proposed in the last few years. Despite impressive empirical successes on downstream tasks, we still have a limited understanding of the properties encoded by the models and the differences across models. In this work, we examine the intermediate representations for a variety of recent models. Specifically, we measure acoustic, phonetic, and word-level properties encoded in individual layers, using a lightweight analysis tool based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA). We find that these properties evolve across layers differently depending on the model, and the variations relate to the choice of pre-training objective. We further investigate the utility of our analyses for downstream tasks by comparing the property trends with performance on speech recognition and spoken language understanding tasks. We discover that CCA trends provide reliable guidance to choose layers of interest for downstream tasks and that single-layer performance often matches or improves upon using all layers, suggesting implications for more efficient use of pre-trained models.

毒性言论，也被称为仇恨言论，被认为是今天批评在线社交媒体的重要问题之一。最近关于有毒语音检测的工作受到文本的模型，没有现有的毒性检测从口语中的出口检测。在本文中，我们提出了一种从口语中检测毒性的新口语处理任务。我们介绍了排毒，这是英语演讲的第一个公开的毒性注释数据集，来自各种公开可用的语音数据库，包括超过200万个话语。最后，我们还提供了对毒性注释的语音语料库的分析可以帮助促进E2E模型的发展，更好地捕获语音中的各种韵律线索，从而提高了口语的毒性分类。

这项工作旨在自动评估儿童的语言发展是否适合年龄。经过验证的语音和语言测试用于此目的测试听觉记忆。在这项工作中，任务是确定是否正确说出了口语非单词。我们比较有动机来建模特定语言结构的不同方法：低水平特征（FFT），扬声器嵌入（ECAPA-TDNN），素化 - 动机的嵌入（WAV2VEC 2.0）和语音嵌入Senones（ASR ASR ACOSTIC模型）形式。每种方法都提供了类似VGG的5层CNN分类器的输入。我们还检查了每个非单词的适应性。使用来自口头非单词的不同幼儿园的录音进行了对拟议系统的评估。 ECAPA-TDNN和低级FFT特征不会明确模型语音信息； WAV2VEC2.0经过素数标签训练，我们的ASR声学模型包含（子）语音信息。我们发现，语音建模越颗粒状，达到的识别率就越高。在ASR声学模型特征上训练的最佳系统的精度为89.4％，在ROC（接收器操作特征）曲线（AUC）下的面积为0.923。与FFT-BASELINE相比，这对应于20.2％和AUC相对0.309的改善。

Transformer-based models have pushed state of the art in many areas of NLP, but our understanding of what is behind their success is still limited. This paper is the first survey of over 150 studies of the popular BERT model. We review the current state of knowledge about how BERT works, what kind of information it learns and how it is represented, common modifications to its training objectives and architecture, the overparameterization issue and approaches to compression. We then outline directions for future research.

We study the capabilities of speech processing systems trained simply to predict large amounts of transcripts of audio on the internet. When scaled to 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervision, the resulting models generalize well to standard benchmarks and are often competitive with prior fully supervised results but in a zero-shot transfer setting without the need for any fine-tuning. When compared to humans, the models approach their accuracy and robustness. We are releasing models and inference code to serve as a foundation for further work on robust speech processing.

幽默是人类情感和认知的重要因素。它的自动理解可以促进更自然的人类设备互动和人工智能的人性化。当前的幽默检测方法仅基于分阶段数据，使其不适用于“现实世界”应用程序。我们通过引入新颖的Passau自发足球教练幽默（Passau-SFCH）数据集来解决这种缺陷，包括大约11个小时的录音。在马丁的幽默风格问卷中提出的幽默及其尺寸（情感和方向）的存在，请注释Passau-SFCH数据集。我们进行了一系列实验，采用了经过预定的变压器，卷积神经网络和专家设计的功能。分析了每种模式（文本，音频，视频）的表现，以进行自发幽默识别，并研究了它们的互补性。我们的发现表明，对于对幽默及其情感的自动分析，面部表情是最有希望的，而幽默方向可以通过基于文本的功能进行建模。结果揭示了各种主题之间的差异，突出了幽默用法和风格的个性。此外，我们观察到决策级融合会产生最佳认可结果。最后，我们在https://www.github.com/eihw/passau-sfch上公开代码。可以根据要求获得Passau-SFCH数据集。

口语理解（SLU）是大多数人机相互作用系统中的核心任务。随着智能家居，智能手机和智能扬声器的出现，SLU已成为该行业的关键技术。在经典的SLU方法中，自动语音识别（ASR）模块将语音信号转录为文本表示，自然语言理解（NLU）模块从中提取语义信息。最近，基于深神经网络的端到端SLU（E2E SLU）已经获得了动力，因为它受益于ASR和NLU部分的联合优化，因此限制了管道架构的误差效应的级联反应。但是，对于E2E模型用于预测语音输入的概念和意图的实际语言特性知之甚少。在本文中，我们提出了一项研究，以确定E2E模型执行SLU任务的信号特征和其他语言特性。该研究是在必须处理非英语（此处法语）语音命令的智能房屋的应用领域进行的。结果表明，良好的E2E SLU性能并不总是需要完美的ASR功能。此外，结果表明，与管道模型相比，E2E模型在处理背景噪声和句法变化方面具有出色的功能。最后，更细粒度的分析表明，E2E模型使用输入信号的音调信息来识别语音命令概念。本文概述的结果和方法提供了一个跳板，以进一步分析语音处理中的E2E模型。

Collecting sufficient labeled data for spoken language understanding (SLU) is expensive and time-consuming. Recent studies achieved promising results by using pre-trained models in low-resource scenarios. Inspired by this, we aim to ask: which (if any) pre-training strategies can improve performance across SLU benchmarks? To answer this question, we employ four types of pre-trained models and their combinations for SLU. We leverage self-supervised speech and language models (LM) pre-trained on large quantities of unpaired data to extract strong speech and text representations. We also explore using supervised models pre-trained on larger external automatic speech recognition (ASR) or SLU corpora. We conduct extensive experiments on the SLU Evaluation (SLUE) benchmark and observe self-supervised pre-trained models to be more powerful, with pre-trained LM and speech models being most beneficial for the Sentiment Analysis and Named Entity Recognition task, respectively.

通过共享数据集和基准，已经促进了语音处理的进展。历史上，这些都集中在自动语音识别（ASR），扬声器标识或其他较低级别的任务上。兴趣在更高层次的口语中越来越多，理解任务，包括使用端到端模型，但是此类任务的注释数据集较少。与此同时，最近的工作显示了预先培训通用表示的可能性，然后使用相对较少标记的数据进行微调的多个任务。我们建议为口语语言理解（屠宰）创建一套基准任务，由有限尺寸标记的培训集和相应的评估集组成。该资源将允许研究界跟踪进度，评估高级任务的预先接受预期的表示，并研究开放的问题，例如管道与端到端方法的实用性。我们介绍了雪橇基准套件的第一阶段，包括指定实体识别，情感分析和相应数据集上的ASR。我们专注于自然产生的（未读取或综合）语音和自由可用的数据集。我们为VoxceReb和Voxpopuli数据集的子集提供新的转录和注释，基线模型的评估指标和结果，以及重现基线的开源工具包，并评估新模型。

Through solving pretext tasks, self-supervised learning leverages unlabeled data to extract useful latent representations replacing traditional input features in the downstream task. In audio/speech signal processing, a wide range of features where engineered through decades of research efforts. As it turns out, learning to predict such features (a.k.a pseudo-labels) has proven to be a particularly relevant pretext task, leading to useful self-supervised representations which prove to be effective for downstream tasks. However, methods and common practices for combining such pretext tasks for better performance on the downstream task have not been explored and understood properly. In fact, the process relies almost exclusively on a computationally heavy experimental procedure, which becomes intractable with the increase of the number of pretext tasks. This paper introduces a method to select a group of pretext tasks among a set of candidates. The method we propose estimates calibrated weights for the partial losses corresponding to the considered pretext tasks during the self-supervised training process. The experiments conducted on automatic speech recognition, speaker and emotion recognition validate our approach, as the groups selected and weighted with our method perform better than classic baselines, thus facilitating the selection and combination of relevant pseudo-labels for self-supervised representation learning.

Human speech can be characterized by different components, including semantic content, speaker identity and prosodic information. Significant progress has been made in disentangling representations for semantic content and speaker identity in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and speaker verification tasks respectively. However, it is still an open challenging research question to extract prosodic information because of the intrinsic association of different attributes, such as timbre and rhythm, and because of the need for unsupervised training schemes to achieve robust large-scale and speaker-independent ASR. The aim of this paper is to address the disentanglement of emotional prosody from speech based on unsupervised reconstruction. Specifically, we identify, design, implement and integrate three crucial components in our proposed speech reconstruction model Prosody2Vec: (1) a unit encoder that transforms speech signals into discrete units for semantic content, (2) a pretrained speaker verification model to generate speaker identity embeddings, and (3) a trainable prosody encoder to learn prosody representations. We first pretrain the Prosody2Vec representations on unlabelled emotional speech corpora, then fine-tune the model on specific datasets to perform Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) and Emotional Voice Conversion (EVC) tasks. Both objective and subjective evaluations on the EVC task suggest that Prosody2Vec effectively captures general prosodic features that can be smoothly transferred to other emotional speech. In addition, our SER experiments on the IEMOCAP dataset reveal that the prosody features learned by Prosody2Vec are complementary and beneficial for the performance of widely used speech pretraining models and surpass the state-of-the-art methods when combining Prosody2Vec with HuBERT representations. Some audio samples can be found on our demo website.

情绪转换（EVC）寻求转换话语的情绪状态，同时保留语言内容和扬声器身份。在EVC，情绪通常被视为离散类别，忽略了言论也传达了听众可以感知的各种强度水平的情绪。在本文中，我们的目标是明确地表征和控制情绪强度。我们建议解开语言内容的扬声器风格，并将扬声器风格编码成一个嵌入的嵌入空间，形成情绪嵌入的原型。我们进一步从情感标记的数据库中了解实际的情感编码器，并研究使用相对属性来表示细粒度的情绪强度。为确保情绪可理解性，我们将情感分类损失和情感嵌入了EVC网络培训中的相似性损失。根据需要，所提出的网络控制输出语音中的细粒度情绪强度。通过目标和主观评估，我们验证了建议网络的情感表达和情感强度控制的有效性。

语言可以用作再现和执行有害刻板印象和偏差的手段，并被分析在许多研究中。在本文中，我们对自然语言处理中的性别偏见进行了304篇论文。我们分析了社会科学中性别及其类别的定义，并将其连接到NLP研究中性别偏见的正式定义。我们调查了在对性别偏见的研究中应用的Lexica和数据集，然后比较和对比方法来检测和减轻性别偏见。我们发现对性别偏见的研究遭受了四个核心限制。 1）大多数研究将性别视为忽视其流动性和连续性的二元变量。 2）大部分工作都在单机设置中进行英语或其他高资源语言进行。 3）尽管在NLP方法中对性别偏见进行了无数的论文，但我们发现大多数新开发的算法都没有测试他们的偏见模型，并无视他们的工作的伦理考虑。 4）最后，在这一研究线上发展的方法基本缺陷涵盖性别偏差的非常有限的定义，缺乏评估基线和管道。我们建议建议克服这些限制作为未来研究的指导。

任务嵌入式是培训以捕获任务属性的低维表示。在本文中，我们提出了Metaeval，一系列101美元的NLP任务。我们将单个变压器与所有Metaeval任务联系在一起，同时将其调制到学习嵌入。由此产生的任务嵌入物能够对任务空间进行新颖分析。然后，我们显示任务方面可以映射到任务嵌入式的任务嵌入式，以用于新任务，而无需使用任何注释的示例。预测嵌入物可以调制编码器以进行零拍摄推断，并优于胶水任务上的零拍摄基线。提供的多任务设置可以用作未来转移学习研究的基准。

In this paper, we present a novel method for phoneme-level prosody control of F0 and duration using intuitive discrete labels. We propose an unsupervised prosodic clustering process which is used to discretize phoneme-level F0 and duration features from a multispeaker speech dataset. These features are fed as an input sequence of prosodic labels to a prosody encoder module which augments an autoregressive attention-based text-to-speech model. We utilize various methods in order to improve prosodic control range and coverage, such as augmentation, F0 normalization, balanced clustering for duration and speaker-independent clustering. The final model enables fine-grained phoneme-level prosody control for all speakers contained in the training set, while maintaining the speaker identity. Instead of relying on reference utterances for inference, we introduce a prior prosody encoder which learns the style of each speaker and enables speech synthesis without the requirement of reference audio. We also fine-tune the multispeaker model to unseen speakers with limited amounts of data, as a realistic application scenario and show that the prosody control capabilities are maintained, verifying that the speaker-independent prosodic clustering is effective. Experimental results show that the model has high output speech quality and that the proposed method allows efficient prosody control within each speaker's range despite the variability that a multispeaker setting introduces.

语音情感转换是修改语音话语的感知情绪的任务，同时保留词汇内容和扬声器身份。在这项研究中，我们将情感转换问题作为口语翻译任务。我们将演讲分解为离散和解散的学习表现，包括内容单位，F0，扬声器和情感。首先，我们通过将内容单元转换为目标情绪来修改语音内容，然后基于这些单元预测韵律特征。最后，通过将预测的表示馈送到神经声码器中来生成语音波形。这样的范式允许我们超越信号的光谱和参数变化，以及模型非口头发声，例如笑声插入，打开拆除等。我们客观地和主观地展示所提出的方法在基础上优于基线感知情绪和音频质量。我们严格评估了这种复杂系统的所有组成部分，并通过广泛的模型分析和消融研究结束，以更好地强调建议方法的建筑选择，优势和弱点。示例和代码将在以下链接下公开使用：https://speechbot.github.io/emotion。

神经文本到语音研究的最新进展是利用低级中间语音表示（例如MEL-光谱图）的两阶段管道主导的。但是，这种预定的特征从根本上受到限制，因为它们不允许通过学习隐藏表示形式来利用数据驱动方法的全部潜力。因此，已经提出了几种端到端方法。但是，这样的模型更难训练，并且需要大量具有转录的高质量录音。在这里，我们提出了WavThruvec-一种两阶段的架构，通过使用高维WAV2VEC 2.0嵌入作为中间语音表示，可以解决瓶颈。由于这些隐藏的激活提供了高级语言特征，因此它们对噪音更强大。这使我们能够利用质量较低的注释语音数据集来训练第一阶段模块。同时，由于WAV2VEC 2.0的嵌入已经进行了时间对齐，因此可以在大规模未转录的音频语料库上对第二阶段组件进行培训。这导致了对量表词的概括能力的提高，以及对看不见的说话者的更好概括。我们表明，所提出的模型不仅与最新神经模型的质量相匹配，而且还介绍了有用的属性，可以实现语音转换或零弹性合成的任务。