BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//128.220.36.25//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.26.9// CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-FROM-URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York X-LIC-LOCATION:America/New_York BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20231105T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 RDATE:20241103T020000 TZNAME:EST END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20240310T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 RDATE:20250309T020000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-21023@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T091638Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:
Abstract
\nSpeech data is notoriously difficult to work with due to a variety of codecs\, length s of recordings\, and meta-data formats. We present Lhotse\, a speech data representation library that draws upon lessons learned from Kaldi speech recognition toolkit and brings its concepts into the modern deep learning ecosystem. Lhotse provides a common JSON description format with correspon ding Python classes and data preparation recipes for over 30 popular speec h corpora. Various datasets can be easily combined together and re-purpose d for different tasks. The library handles multi-channel recordings\, long recordings\, local and cloud storage\, lazy and on-the-fly operations amo ngst other features. We introduce Cut and CutSet concepts\, which simplify common data wrangling tasks for audio and help incorporate acoustic conte xt of speech utterances. Finally\, we show how Lhotse leverages PyTorch da ta API abstractions and adopts them to handle speech data for deep learnin g.
\nBiography
\nPiotr Zelasko is an a ssistant research scientist in the Center for Language and Speech Processi ng (CLSP) who specializes in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and spoken language understanding (SLU). His current research focuses on applying mu ltilingual and crosslingual speech recognition systems to categorize the p honetic inventory of a previously unknown language and on improving defens es against adversarial attacks on both speaker identification and automati c speech recognition systems. He is also addressing the question of how to structure a spontaneous conversation into high-level semantic units such as dialog acts or topics. Finally\, he is working on Lhotse + K2\, the nex t-generation speech processing research software ecosystem. Before joining Johns Hopkins\, Zelasko worked as a machine learning consultant for Avaya (2017-2019)\, and as a machine learning engineer for Techmo (2015-2017). Zelasko received his PhD (2019) in electronics engineering\, as well as hi s master’s (2014) and undergraduate degrees (2013) in acoustic engineering from AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków\, Poland.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211029T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211029T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Piotr Zelasko (CLSP at JHU) “Lhotse: a speech data representation l ibrary for the modern deep learning ecosystem” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/piotr-zelasko-clsp-at-jhu-lhotse-a-spee ch-data-representation-library-for-the-modern-deep-learning-ecosystem/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2021\,October\,Zelasko END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-22394@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T091638Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract
\nModel robustness and spurious correlations have received increasing atten tion in the NLP community\, both in methods and evaluation. The term “spur ious correlation” is overloaded though and can refer to any undesirable sh ortcuts learned by the model\, as judged by domain experts.
\nWhen designing mitigation algorithms\, we oft en (implicitly) assume that a spurious feature is irrelevant for predictio n. However\, many features in NLP (e.g. word overlap and negation) are not spurious in the sense that the background is spurious for classifying obj ects in an image. In contrast\, they carry important information that’s ne eded to make predictions by humans. In this talk\, we argue that it is mor e productive to characterize features in terms of their necessity and suff iciency for prediction. We then discuss the implications of this categoriz ation in representation\, learning\, and evaluation.
\nBiogr aphy
\nHe He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Data Science at New York University. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Maryland\, C ollege Park. Before joining NYU\, she spent a year at AWS AI and was a pos t-doc at Stanford University before that. She is interested in building ro bust and trustworthy NLP systems in human-centered settings. Her recent re search focus includes robust language understanding\, collaborative text g eneration\, and understanding capabilities and issues of large language mo dels.
\n DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221014T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221014T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:He He (New York University) “What We Talk about When We Talk about Spurious Correlations in NLP” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/he-he-new-york-university/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,He\,October END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23304@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240329T091638Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract
\nTransformers are essential to pretraining. As we approach 5 years of BERT\, the connection between a ttention as architecture and transfer learning remains key to this central thread in NLP. Other architectures such as CNNs and RNNs have been used t o replicate pretraining results\, but these either fail to reach the same accuracy or require supplemental attention layers. This work revisits the semanal BERT result and considers pretraining without attention. We consid er replacing self-attention layers with recently developed approach for lo ng-range sequence modeling and transformer architecture variants. Specific ally\, inspired by recent papers like the structured space space sequence model (S4)\, we use simple routing layers based on state-space models (SSM ) and a bidirectional model architecture based on multiplicative gating. W e discuss the results of the proposed Bidirectional Gated SSM (BiGS) and p resent a range of analysis into its properties. Results show that architec ture does seem to have a notable impact on downstream performance and a di fferent inductive bias that is worth exploring further.
\nBi ography
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