The unsupervised (zero resource) discovery of linguistic structure from speech is generating a lot of interest from two largely disjoint communities: the machine learning community is more an more interested in deploying language/speech technologies in a variety of languages/dialects with limited or no linguistic resources. The cognitive science community (psycholinguists, linguists, neurolinguists) want to understand the mechanisms by which infants spontaneously discover linguistic structure. The aim of this workshop is to bring together a team of researchers and graduate students from these two communities, to engage into mutual presentations and discussion of current and future issues. Specifically, this workshop has two aims: 1) identifying key issues and problems to be solved of interest to both communities, and 2) setting up standardized, common resources for comparing the different approaches to solving these problems (databases, evaluation criteria, software, etc). In this workshop, we will focus mainly but not exclusively on the discovery of two levels of linguistic structure: phonetic units and word-like units. We are well aware of the fact that the definition of these levels, as well as their segregation from the rest of the linguistic system is itself a matter of debate, and we welcome discussions of these issues as well.
July 16th (Krieger 205): Kick-Off Symposium, Day 1
Morning 10:00a-12:30p
10:00a: Welcome and Overview of objectives [video]
10:30a: Aren Jansen (JHU/HLTCOE): Overview of Zero Resource Technology [pdf] [video]
11:30a: Dan Swingley (U. Penn): Overview of Early Language Acquisition [pdf]
Afternoon 2:30-5:30p
2:30p: Mark Johnson (Macquarie U.): Overview of Bayesian Approaches [pdf] [video]
3:30p: Bill Idsardi (U. Md): Clustering Techniques for Phonetic Categories and their Implications for Phonology [pdf]
4:30p: Emmanuel Dupoux (Ecole Normale Superieure): Modeling Language Bootstrapping: Results & Challenges [video]
July 17th (Krieger 205): Kick-Off Symposium, Day 2
Morning 9:00a-12:30p
9:00a: Naomi Feldman (U. Md): Using Bayesian Approaches to Study Human Sound and Word Learning [pdf] [video]
9:50a: Sharon Goldwater (U. Edinburgh): From Sounds to Words: Bayesian Modeling of Early Language Acquisition [pdf] [video]
10:50a: Sanjeev Khudanpur (JHU): Hybrid Dynamical System Models for Signal Segmentation and Labeling [video]
11:40a: Aren Jansen (JHU/HLTCOE): Towards a Speaker Invariant Representation of Speech [pdf] [video]
Afternoon 2:00p-5:30p
2:00p: Ian McGraw (MIT): Learning the Lexicon: A Pronunciation Mixture Model [pdf] [video]
2:50p: Rick Rose (McGill): Combining Low and High Resource Acoustic Modeling in Spoken Term Detection [pdf] [video]
3:50p: Hynek Hermansky (JHU): Dealing with Previously Unseen Unknowns in the Recognition of Speech [pdf] [video]
4:40p: Ken Church (IBM): OOVs, Pseudo-truth, and Zero Resource Methods [pdf] [video]
For select symposium abstracts, click here.
July 18th (NEB 225): Organization: Data, metrics, subprojects/subteams
July 19th-26th (NEB 225): Collaboration period, informal talks
July 27th (Hackerman B17): Final Presentation at 2:00p [pdf] [video1] [video2]
Benjamin Borschinger: Particle Filtering for Word Segmentation [pdf1] [pdf2]
Mark Johnson: Bayesian Methods Tutorial [pdf]
Hynek Hermansky: Acoustic Processing Tutorial [pdf]
Shinji Watanabe: Integrated Bayesian Unsupervised Acoustic, Lexical, and Language Models [pdf]
Pascal Clark: Rythmic Demodulation for Zero-Resource Speech Recognition [pdf]
Jason Eisner: Discovering Morphological Paradigms from Plain Text Using a Dirichlet Process Mixture Model [pdf]
Team Members | |
---|---|
Senior Members | |
Ken Church | IBM Research |
Pascal Clark | Johns Hopkins University, HLTCOE |
Emmanuel Dupoux | Ecole Normale Superieure |
Naomi Feldman | University of Maryland |
Sharon Goldwater | University of Edinburgh |
Hynek Hermansky | Johns Hopkins University |
Aren Jansen | Johns Hopkins University, HLTCOE |
Mark Johnson | Macquarie University |
Sanjeev Khudanpur | Johns Hopkins University |
Ian McGraw | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Richard Rose | McGill University |
Graduate Students | |
Erin Bennett | University of Maryland |
Benjamin Börschinger | Macquarie University |
Justin Chiu | Carnegie Mellon University |
Ewan Dunbar | University of Maryland |
Abdallah Fourtassi | Ecole Normale Superieure |
David Harwath | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Keith Levin | Johns Hopkins University |
Atta Norouzian | McGill University |
Vijay Peddinti | Johns Hopkins University |
Rachel Richardson | University of Maryland |
Thomas Schatz | Ecole Normale Superieure |
Yuriy Shames | Johns Hopkins University |
Samuel Thomas | Johns Hopkins University |
Affiliate Members | |
Jason Eisner | Johns Hopkins University |
Steven Greenberg | Transparent Language |
Timothy (TJ) Hazen | MIT Lincoln Laboratory |
Florian Metze | Carnegie Mellon University |
Mike Seltzer | Microsoft Research |
Dan Swingley | University of Pennsylvania |
Balakrishnan Varadarajan | |
Shinji Watanabe | Mitsubishi Electronics Research Lab |