Bidirectional Representations for Low-Resource Spoken Language Understanding

Autor: Quentin Meeus, Marie-Francine Moens, Hugo Van hamme
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: Applied Sciences, Vol 13, Iss 20, p 11291 (2023)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2076-3417
DOI: 10.3390/app132011291
Popis: Speech representation models lack the ability to efficiently store semantic information and require fine tuning to deliver decent performance. In this research, we introduce a transformer encoder–decoder framework with a multiobjective training strategy, incorporating connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and masked language modeling (MLM) objectives. This approach enables the model to learn contextual bidirectional representations. We evaluate the representations in a challenging low-resource scenario, where training data is limited, necessitating expressive speech embeddings to compensate for the scarcity of examples. Notably, we demonstrate that our model’s initial embeddings outperform comparable models on multiple datasets before fine tuning. Fine tuning the top layers of the representation model further enhances performance, particularly on the Fluent Speech Command dataset, even under low-resource conditions. Additionally, we introduce the concept of class attention as an efficient module for spoken language understanding, characterized by its speed and minimal parameter requirements. Class attention not only aids in explaining model predictions but also enhances our understanding of the underlying decision-making processes. Our experiments cover both English and Dutch languages, offering a comprehensive evaluation of our proposed approach.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals