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Exploring Massively Multilingual, Massive Neural Machine Translation
Friday, October 11, 2019
Posted by Ankur Bapna, Software Engineer and Orhan Firat, Research Scientist, Google Research
“... perhaps the way [of translation] is to descend, from each language, down to the common base of human communication — the real but as yet undiscovered universal language — and then re-emerge by whatever particular route is convenient.”
—
Warren Weaver
, 1949
Over the last few years there has been enormous progress in the quality of machine translation (MT) systems, breaking language barriers around the world thanks to the developments in
neural machine translation
(NMT). The success of NMT however, owes largely to the great amounts of supervised training data. But what about languages where data is scarce, or even absent? Multilingual NMT, with the inductive bias that “
the learning signal from one language should benefit the quality of translation to other languages”,
is a potential remedy.
Multilingual machine translation processes multiple languages using a single translation model. The success of multilingual training for data-scarce languages has been demonstrated for
automatic speech recognition
and
text-to-speech
systems, and by prior research on multilingual translation [
1
,
2
,
3
]. We previously studied the effect of
scaling up the number of languages
that can be learned in a single neural network, while controlling the amount of training data per language. But what happens once all constraints are removed? Can we train a single model using all of the available data, despite the huge differences across languages in data size, scripts, complexity and domains?
In “
Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild: Findings and Challenges
” and follow-up papers [
4
,
5
,
6
,
7
], we push the limits of research on multilingual NMT by training a single NMT model on 25+ billion sentence pairs, from 100+ languages to and from English, with 50+ billion parameters. The result is an approach for massively multilingual, massive neural machine translation (M4) that demonstrates large quality improvements on both low- and high-resource languages and can be easily adapted to individual domains/languages, while showing great efficacy on cross-lingual downstream transfer tasks.
Massively Multilingual Machine Translation
Though data skew across language-pairs is a
great challenge in NMT
, it also creates an ideal scenario in which to study
transfer
, where insights gained through training on one language can be applied to the translation of other languages. On one end of the distribution, there are high-resource languages like French, German and Spanish where there are billions of parallel examples, while on the other end, supervised data for low-resource languages such as Yoruba, Sindhi and Hawaiian, is limited to a few tens of thousands.
The data distribution over all language pairs (in log scale) and the relative translation quality (
BLEU score
) of the bilingual baselines trained on each one of these specific language pairs.
Once trained using all of the available data (25+ billion examples from 103 languages), we observe strong
positive transfer
towards low-resource languages, dramatically improving the translation quality of 30+ languages at the tail of the distribution by an average of 5
BLEU
points. This effect is
already known
, but surprisingly encouraging, considering the comparison is between bilingual baselines (i.e., models trained only on specific language pairs) and a single multilingual model with
representational capacity
similar to a single bilingual model. This finding hints that massively multilingual models are effective at generalization, and capable of capturing the representational similarity across a large body of languages.
Translation quality comparison of a single massively multilingual model against bilingual baselines that are trained for each one of the 103 language pairs.
In our EMNLP’19 paper [
5
], we compare the representations of multilingual models across different languages. We find that multilingual models learn shared representations for
linguistically similar languages
without the need for external constraints, validating
long-standing intuitions
and empirical results that
exploit these similarities
. In [
6
], we further demonstrate the effectiveness of these learned representations on cross-lingual transfer on downstream tasks.
Visualization of the clustering of the encoded representations of all 103 languages, based on representational similarity. Languages are color-coded by their
linguistic family
.
Building Massive Neural Networks
As we increase the number of low-resource languages in the model, the quality of high-resource language translations starts to decline. This regression is
recognized
in multi-task setups, arising from inter-task competition and the unidirectional nature of transfer (i.e., from high- to low-resource)
.
While working on
better learning
and
capacity control
algorithms to mitigate this
negative transfer
, we also extend the representational capacity of our neural networks by making them bigger by increasing the number of model parameters to improve the quality of translation for high-resource languages.
Numerous design choices can be made to scale neural network capacity, including adding more layers or making the hidden representations wider. Continuing
our study
on training deeper networks for translation, we utilized
GPipe
[
4
] to train 128-layer
Transformers
with over 6 billion parameters. Increasing the model capacity resulted in significantly improved performance across all languages by an average of 5
BLEU
points. We also studied other properties of very deep networks, including the
depth-width trade-off
, trainability challenges and design choices for scaling Transformers to over 1500 layers with 84 billion parameters.
While scaling depth is one approach to increasing model capacity, exploring architectures that can exploit the multi-task nature of the problem is a very plausible complementary way forward. By modifying the Transformer architecture through the substitution of the vanilla feed-forward layers with
sparsely-gated mixture of experts
, we drastically scale up the model capacity, allowing us to successfully train and pass 50 billion parameters, which further improved translation quality across the board.
Translation quality improvement of a single massively multilingual model as we increase the capacity (number of parameters) compared to 103 individual bilingual baselines.
Making M4 Practical
It is inefficient to train large models with extremely high computational costs for every individual language, domain or transfer task. Instead, we present methods [
7
] to make these models more practical by using capacity tunable layers to adapt a new model to specific languages or domains, without altering the original.
Next Steps
At least half of the 7,000 languages currently spoken will no longer exist by the end of this century
*
. Can multilingual machine translation come to the rescue? We see the M4 approach as a stepping stone towards serving the next 1,000 languages; starting from such multilingual models will allow us to easily extend to new languages, domains and down-stream tasks, even when parallel data is unavailable. Indeed the path is rocky, and on the road to universal MT many promising solutions appear to be interdisciplinary. This makes multilingual NMT a plausible test bed for machine learning practitioners and theoreticians interested in exploring the annals of multi-task learning, meta-learning, training dynamics of deep nets and much more. We still have a long way to go.
Acknowledgements
This effort is built on contributions from Naveen Arivazhagan, Dmitry Lepikhin, Melvin Johnson, Maxim Krikun, Mia Chen, Yuan Cao, Yanping Huang, Sneha Kudugunta, Isaac Caswell, Aditya Siddhant, Wei Wang, Roee Aharoni, Sébastien Jean, George Foster, Colin Cherry, Wolfgang Macherey, Zhifeng Chen and Yonghui Wu. We would also like to acknowledge support from the Google Translate, Brain, and Lingvo development teams, Jakob Uszkoreit, Noam Shazeer, Hyouk Joong Lee, Dehao Chen, Youlong Cheng, David Grangier, Colin Raffel, Katherine Lee, Thang Luong, Geoffrey Hinton, Manisha Jain, Pendar Yousefi and Macduff Hughes.
*
The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages (Austin and Sallabank, 2011).
↩
ROBEL: Robotics Benchmarks for Learning with Low-Cost Robots
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Posted by Michael Ahn, Software Engineer and Vikash Kumar, Research Scientist, Robotics at Google
Learning-based methods for solving robotic control problems have recently seen significant momentum, driven by the widening availability of simulated benchmarks (like
dm_control
or
OpenAI-Gym
) and advancements in flexible and scalable reinforcement learning techniques (
DDPG
,
QT-Opt
, or
Soft Actor-Critic
). While learning through simulation is effective, these simulated environments often encounter difficulty in deploying to real-world robots due to factors such as inaccurate modeling of physical phenomena and system delays. This motivates the need to develop robotic control solutions directly in the real world, on real physical hardware.
The majority of current robotics research on physical hardware is conducted on high-cost, industrial-quality robots (
PR2
,
Kuka-arms
,
ShadowHand
,
Baxter
, etc.) intended for precise, monitored operation in controlled environments. Furthermore, these robots are designed around traditional control methods that focus on precision, repeatability, and ease of characterization. This stands in sharp contrast with the learning-based methods that are robust to imperfect sensing and actuation, and demand (a) a high degree of resilience to allow real-world trial-and-error learning, (b) low cost and ease of maintenance to enable scalability through replication and (c) a reliable reset mechanism to alleviate strict human monitoring requirements.
In “
ROBEL: Robotics Benchmarks for Learning with Low-Cost Robots
”, to be presented at
CoRL 2019
, we introduce an open-source platform of cost-effective robots and curated benchmarks designed primarily to facilitate research and development on physical hardware in the real world. Analogous to an
optical table
in the field of optics, ROBEL serves as a rapid experimentation platform, supporting a wide range of experimental needs and the development of new reinforcement learning and control methods. ROBEL consists of
D'Claw
, a three-fingered hand robot that facilitates learning of dexterous manipulation tasks and
D'Kitty
, a four-legged robot that enables the learning of agile legged locomotion tasks. The robotic platforms are low-cost, modular, easy to maintain, and are robust enough to sustain on-hardware reinforcement learning from scratch.
Left:
The 12 DoF
D’Kitty
;
Middle:
The 9 DoF
D’Claw
;
Right:
A functional D’Claw setup
D’Lantern
.
In order to make the robots relatively inexpensive and easy to build, we based ROBEL’s designs on off-the-shelf components and commonly-available prototyping tools (3D-printed or laser cut). Designs are easy to assemble and require only a few hours to build. Detailed part lists (with CAD details), assembly instructions, and software instructions for getting started are available
here
.
ROBEL Benchmarks
We devised a set of tasks suitable for each platform, D’Claw and D’Kitty, which can be used for benchmarking real-world robotic learning. ROBEL’s task definitions include both dense and sparse task objectives, and introduce metrics for hardware-safety in the task definition, which for example, indicate if joints are exceeding “safe” operating bounds or force thresholds. ROBEL also supports a simulator for all tasks to facilitate algorithmic development and rapid prototyping. D’Claw tasks are centered around three commonly observed manipulation behaviors — Pose, Turn, and Screw.
Left:
Pose —
Conform to the shape of the environment.
Center:
Turn —
Turn the object to a specified angle.
Right:
Screw —
Continuously rotate the object. (Click images for video.)
D’Kitty tasks are centered around three commonly observed locomotion behaviors — Stand, Orient, and Walk.
Left:
Stand —
Stand upright.
Center:
Orient —
Align heading with the target.
Right:
Walk —
Move to the target. (Click images for video.)
We evaluated several classes (on-policy, off policy, demo-accelerated, supervised) of deep reinforcement learning methods on each of these benchmark tasks. The evaluation results and the final policies are included as baselines in the software package for comparison. Full task details and baseline performances are available in the
technical report
.
Reproducibility & Robustness
ROBEL platforms are robust to sustain direct hardware training, and have clocked over 14,000 hours of real-world experience to-date. The platforms have significantly matured over the year. Owing to the modularity of the design, repairs are trivial and require minimal to no domain expertise, making the overall system easy to maintain.
To establish the replicability of the platforms and reproducibility of the benchmarks, ROBEL was studied in isolation by two different research labs. Only software distribution and documentation was used in this study. No in-person visits were allowed. Using ROBEL’s design files and assembly instructions both sites were able to replicate both hardware platforms. Benchmark tasks were trained on robots built at both sites. In the figure below we see that two D’Claw robots built at two different sites not only exhibit similar training progress but also converge to the same final performance, establishing reproducibility of the ROBEL benchmarks.
SAC
training performance of a task on two real D’Claw robots developed at different laboratory locations.
Results Gallery
ROBEL has been useful in a variety of reinforcement learning studies so far. Below we highlight a few of the key results, and you can find all our results in this
comprehensive gallery
. D’Claw platforms are completely autonomous and can sustain reliable experimentation for an extended period of time, and has facilitated experimentation with a wide variety of reinforcement learning paradigms and tasks using both rigid and flexible objects.
Left:
Flexible Objects —
On-hardware training
with
DAPG
effectively learns to turn flexible objects. We observe manipulation targeting the center of the valve where there is more rigidity. D'Claw is robust to on-hardware training, facilitating successful outcomes on hard to simulate tasks.
Center:
Disturbance Rejection —
A Sim2Real policy trained via
Natural Policy Gradient
on
MuJoCo
simulation with object perturbations (amongst others) being tested on hardware. We observe fingers working together to resist external disturbances.
Right:
Obstructed Finger —
A Sim2Real policy trained via
Natural Policy Gradient
on
MuJoCo
simulation with external perturbations (amongst others) being tested on hardware. We observe that free fingers fill in for the missing finger.
Importantly, D’Claw platforms are modular and easy to replicate, which facilitates scalable experimentation. With our scaled setup, we find that multiple D’Claws can collectively learn tasks faster by sharing experience.
On-hardware training with distributed version of
SAC
leaning to turn multiple objects to arbitrary angles in conjunction by sharing experience. Five tasks only need twice the amount of experience of single tasks, thanks to the multi-task formulation. In the video we observe five D'Claws turning different objects to 180 degrees (picked for visual effectiveness, actual policy can turn to any angle).
We have also been successful in deploying robust locomotion policies on the D’Kitty platform. Below we show a blind D’Kitty walking over indoor and outdoor terrains exhibiting the robustness of its gait in presence of unseen disturbances.
Left:
Indoor
–
Walking in Clutter —
A Sim2Real policy trained via
Natural Policy Gradient
on
MuJoCo
simulation with randomized perturbations learns to walk in clutter and step over objects.
Center:
Outdoor – Gravel and Branches —
A Sim2Real policy trained via
Natural Policy Gradient
on
MuJoCo
simulation with randomized height field learns to walk outdoors over gravel and branches.
Right:
Outdoor
–
Slope and Grass —
A Sim2Real policy trained via
Natural Policy Gradient
on
MuJoCo
simulation with randomized height field learns to handle moderate slopes.
When presented with information about its torso and objects present in the scene, D’Kitty can learn to interact with these objects exhibiting complex behaviors.
Left:
Avoid Moving Obstacles —
Policy trained via
Hierarchical Sim2Real
learns to avoid a moving block and reach the target (marked by the controller on the floor).
Center:
Push to Moving Goal —
Policy trained via
Hierarchical Sim2Real
learns to push block towards a moving target (marked by the controller in the hand).
Right:
Co-ordinate —
Policy trained via
Hierarchical Sim2Real
learns to coordinate two D'Kitties to push a heavy block towards a target (marked by two + signs on the floor).
In conclusion, ROBEL platforms are low cost, robust, reliable and are designed to accommodate the needs of the emerging learning-based paradigms that need scalability and resilience. We are proud to announce the release of ROBEL to the open source community and are excited to learn about the diversity of research and experimentation they will enable. For getting started on ROBEL platforms and ROBEL benchmarks refer to
roboticsbenchmarks.org
.
Acknowledgments
Google's ROBEL D'Claw evolved from earlier designs Vikash Kumar developed at the Universities of Washington and Berkeley. Multiple people across organizations have contributed towards the ROBEL projects. We thank our co-authors Henry Zhu (UC Berkeley), Kristian Hartikainen (UC Berkeley), Abhishek Gupta (UC Berkeley) and Sergey Levine (Google and UC Berkeley) for their contributions and extensive feedback throughout the project. We would like to acknowledge Matt Neiss (Google) and Chad Richards (Google) for their significant contribution to the platform designs. We would also like to thank Aravind Rajeshwaran (U-Washington), Emo Todorov (U-Washington), and Vincent Vanhoucke (Google) for their helpful discussions and comments throughout the project.
Improving Quantum Computation with Classical Machine Learning
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Posted by Murphy Yuezhen Niu and Sergio Boixo, Research Scientists
One of the primary challenges for the realization of near-term quantum computers has to do with their most basic constituent: the
qubit
. Qubits can interact with anything in close proximity that carries
energy
close to their own—stray
photons
(i.e., unwanted electromagnetic fields),
phonons
(mechanical oscillations of the quantum device), or quantum defects (irregularities in the substrate of the chip formed during manufacturing)—which can unpredictably change the state of the qubits themselves.
Further complicating matters, there are numerous challenges posed by the tools used to control qubits. Manipulating and reading out qubits is performed via
classical
controls: analog signals in the form of electromagnetic fields coupled to a physical substrate in which the qubit is embedded, e.g., superconducting circuits. Imperfections in these control electronics (giving rise to
white noise
), interference from external sources of radiation, and fluctuations in
digital-to-analog
converters, introduce even more stochastic errors that degrade the performance of quantum circuits. These practical issues impact the fidelity of the computation and thus limit the applications of near-term quantum devices.
To improve the computational capacity of quantum computers, and to pave the road towards large-scale quantum computation, it is necessary to first build physical models that accurately describe these experimental problems.
In “
Universal Quantum Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning
”, published in
Nature Partner Journal (npj) Quantum Information
, we present a new quantum control framework generated using deep reinforcement learning, where various practical concerns in quantum control optimization can be encapsulated by a single control
cost function
. Our framework provides a reduction in the average
quantum logic gate
error of up to two orders-of-magnitude over standard stochastic gradient descent solutions and a significant decrease in gate time from optimal gate synthesis counterparts. Our results open a venue for wider applications in quantum simulation, quantum chemistry and quantum supremacy tests using near-term quantum devices.
The novelty of this new quantum control paradigm hinges upon the development of a quantum control function and an efficient optimization method based on deep reinforcement learning. To develop a comprehensive cost function, we first need to develop a physical model for the realistic quantum control process, one where we are able to reliably predict the amount of error. One of the most detrimental errors to the accuracy of quantum computation is leakage: the amount of quantum information lost during the computation. Such information leakage usually occurs when the quantum state of a qubit gets excited to a higher energy state, or decays to a lower energy state through spontaneous emission. Leakage errors not only lose useful quantum information, they also degrade the “quantumness” and eventually reduce the performance of a quantum computer to that of a classical one.
A common practice to accurately evaluate the leaked information during the quantum computation is to simulate the whole computation first. However, this defeats the purpose of building large-scale quantum computers, since their advantage is that they are able to perform calculations infeasible for classical systems. With improved physical modeling, our generic cost function enables a joint optimization over the accumulated leakage errors, violations of control boundary conditions, total gate time, and gate fidelity.
With the new quantum control cost function in hand, the next step is to apply an efficient optimization tool to minimize it. Existing optimization methods turn out to be unsatisfactory in finding high fidelity solutions that are also robust to control fluctuations. Instead, we apply an on-policy
deep reinforcement learning
(RL) method,
trusted-region RL
, since this method exhibits good performance in all benchmark problems, is inherently robust to sample noise, and has the capability to optimize hard control problems with hundreds of millions of control parameters. The salient difference between this on-policy RL from previously studied
off-policy RL methods
is that the control policy is represented independently from the control cost. Off-policy RL, such as
Q-learning
, on the other hand, uses a single neural network (NN) to represent both the control trajectory, and the associated reward, where the control trajectory specifies the control signals to be coupled to qubits at different time steps, and the associated award evaluates how good the current step of the quantum control is.
On-policy RL is well known for its ability to leverage non-local features in control trajectories, which becomes crucial when the control landscape is high-dimensional and packed with a combinatorially large number of non-global solutions, as is often the case for quantum systems.
We encode the control trajectory into a three-layer, fully connected NN—the
policy NN
—and the control cost function into a second NN—the
value NN
—which encodes the discounted future reward. Robust control solutions were obtained by reinforcement learning agents, which trains both NNs under a stochastic environment that mimics a realistic noisy control actuation. We provide control solutions to a set of continuously parameterized two-qubit quantum gates that are important for quantum chemistry applications but are costly to implement using the conventional universal gate set.
Under this new framework, our numerical simulations show a 100x reduction in quantum gate errors and reduced gate times for a family of continuously parameterized simulation gates by an average of one order-of-magnitude over traditional approaches using a universal gate set.
This work highlights the importance of using novel machine learning techniques and near-term quantum algorithms that leverage the flexibility and additional computational capacity of a universal quantum control scheme. More experiments are needed to integrate machine learning techniques, such as the one developed in this work, into practical quantum computation procedures to fully improve its computational capacity through machine learning.
Releasing PAWS and PAWS-X: Two New Datasets to Improve Natural Language Understanding Models
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Posted by Yuan Zhang, Research Scientist and Yinfei Yang, Software Engineer, Google Research
Word order and syntactic structure have a large impact on sentence meaning — even small perturbations in word order can completely change interpretation. For example, consider the following related sentences:
Flights from New York to Florida.
Flights to Florida from New York.
Flights from Florida to New York.
All three have the same set of words. However, 1 and 2 have the same meaning — known as
paraphrase pairs
— while 1 and 3 have very different meanings — known as
non-paraphrase pairs
. The task of identifying whether pairs are paraphrase or not is called paraphrase identification, and this task is important to many real-world natural language understanding (NLU) applications such as question answering. Perhaps surprisingly, even state-of-the-art models, like
BERT
, would fail to correctly identify the difference between many non-paraphrase pairs like 1 and 3 above if trained only on existing NLU datasets. This is because existing datasets lack training pairs like this, so it is hard for machine learning models to learn this pattern even if they have the capability to understand complex contextual phrasings.
To address this, we are releasing two new datasets for use in the research community:
Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling
(PAWS) in English, and
PAWS-X
, an extension of the PAWS dataset to six typologically distinct languages: French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Both datasets contain well-formed sentence pairs with high
lexical overlap
, in which about half of the pairs are paraphrase and others are not. Including new pairs in training data for state-of-the-art models improves their accuracy on this problem from <50% to 85-90%. In contrast, models that do not capture non-local contextual information fail even with new training examples. The new datasets therefore provide an effective instrument for measuring the sensitivity of models to word order and structure.
The PAWS dataset contains 108,463 human-labeled pairs in English, sourced from
Quora Question Pairs
(QQP) and
Wikipedia
pages. PAWS-X contains 23,659 human translated PAWS evaluation pairs and 296,406 machine translated training pairs. The table below gives detailed statistics of the datasets.
PAWS
PAWS-X
Language
English
English
Chinese
French
German
Japanese
Korean
Spanish
(QQP)
(Wiki)
(Wiki)
(Wiki)
(Wiki)
(Wiki)
(Wiki)
(Wiki)
Training
11,988
79,798
49,401
†
49,401
†
49,401
†
49,401
†
49,401
†
49,401
†
Dev
677
8,000
1,984
1,992
1,932
1,980
1,965
1,962
Test
-
8,000
1,975
1,985
1,967
1,946
1,972
1,999
† The training set of PAWS-X is machine translated from a subset of the PAWS Wiki dataset in English.
Creating the PAWS Dataset in English
In “
PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling
,” we introduce a workflow for generating pairs of sentences that have high word overlap, but which are balanced with respect to whether they are paraphrases or not. To generate examples, source sentences are first passed to a specialized
language model
that creates word-swapped variants that are still semantically meaningful, but ambiguous as to whether they are paraphrase pairs or not. These were then judged by human raters for grammaticality and then multiple raters judged whether they were paraphrases of each other.
PAWS corpus creation workflow.
One problem with this swapping strategy is that it tends to produce pairs that aren't paraphrases (e.g., "
why do bad things happen to good people
" != "
why do good things happen to bad people
"). In order to ensure balance between paraphrases and non-paraphrases, we added other examples based on
back-translation
. Back-translation has the opposite bias as it tends to preserve meaning while changing word order and word choice. These two strategies lead to PAWS being balanced overall, especially for the Wikipedia portion.
Creating the Multilingual PAWS-X Dataset
After creating PAWS,
we extended it
to six more languages: Chinese, French, German, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish. We hired human translators to translate the development and test sets, and used a
neural machine translation (NMT) service
to translate the training set.
We obtained human translations (native speakers) on a random sample of 4,000 sentence pairs from the PAWS development set for each of the six languages (48,000 translations). Each sentence in a pair is presented independently so that translation is not affected by context. A randomly sampled subset was validated by a second worker. The final dataset has less than 5% word level error rate.
Note, we allowed professionals to not translate a sentence if it was incomplete or ambiguous. On average, less than 2% of the pairs were not translated, and we simply excluded them. The final translated pairs are split then into new development and test sets, ~2,000 pairs for each.
Examples of human translated pairs for German(de) and Chinese(zh).
Language Understanding with PAWS and PAWS-X
We train multiple models on the created dataset and measure the classification accuracy on the eval set. When trained with PAWS, strong models, such as
BERT
and
DIIN
, show remarkable improvement over when they are trained on the existing
Quora Question Pairs
(QQP) dataset. For example, on the PAWS data sourced from QQP (PAWS-QQP), BERT gets only 33.5 accuracy if trained on existing QQP, but it recovers to 83.1 accuracy when given PAWS training examples. Unlike BERT, a simple
Bag-of-Words
(BOW) model fails to learn from PAWS training examples, demonstrating its weakness at capturing non-local contextual information. These results demonstrate that PAWS effectively measures sensitivity of models to word order and structure.
Accuracy on PAWS-QQP Eval Set (English).
The figure below shows the performance of the popular
multilingual BERT
model on PAWS-X using several common strategies:
Zero Shot
: The model is trained on the PAWS English training data, and then directly evaluated on all others. Machine translation is
not
involved in this strategy.
Translate Test
: Train a model using the English training data, and machine-translate all test examples to English for evaluation.
Translate Train
: The English training data is machine-translated into each target language to provide data to train each model.
Merged
: Train a multilingual model on all languages, including the original English pairs and machine-translated data in all other languages.
The results show that cross-lingual techniques help, while it also leaves considerable headroom to drive multilingual research on the problem of paraphrase identification
Accuracy of PAWS-X Test Set using BERT Models.
It is our hope that these datasets will be useful to the research community to drive further progress on multilingual models that better exploit structure, context, and pairwise comparisons.
Acknowledgements
The core team includes Luheng He, Jason Baldridge, Chris Tar. We would like to thank the Language team in Google Research, especially Emily Pitler, for the insightful comments that contributed to our papers. Many thanks also to Ashwin Kakarla, Henry Jicha, and Mengmeng Niu, for the help with the annotations.
Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Recognition with a Streaming End-to-End Model
Monday, September 30, 2019
Posted by Arindrima Datta and Anjuli Kannan, Software Engineers, Google Research
Google's mission is not just to organize the world's information but to make it
universally
accessible, which means ensuring that our products work in as many of the world's languages as possible. When it comes to understanding human speech, which is a core capability of the Google Assistant, extending to more languages poses a challenge: high-quality
automatic speech recognition
(ASR) systems require large amounts of audio and text data — even more so as data-hungry neural models continue to revolutionize the field. Yet many languages have little data available.
We wondered how we could keep the quality of speech recognition high for speakers of data-scarce languages. A key insight from the research community was that much of the "knowledge" a neural network learns from audio data of a data-rich language is re-usable by data-scarce languages; we don't need to learn everything from scratch. This led us to study multilingual speech recognition, in which a single model learns to transcribe multiple languages.
In “
Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Recognition with a Streaming End-to-End Model
”, published at
Interspeech 2019
, we present an end-to-end (E2E) system trained as a single model, which allows for real-time multilingual speech recognition. Using nine Indian languages, we demonstrated a dramatic improvement in the ASR quality on several data-scarce languages, while still improving performance for the data-rich languages.
India: A Land of Languages
For this study, we focused on India, an inherently multilingual society where there are more than thirty languages with at least a million native speakers. Many of these languages overlap in acoustic and lexical content due to the geographic proximity of the native speakers and shared cultural history. Additionally, many Indians are bilingual or trilingual, making the use of multiple languages within a conversation a common phenomenon, and a natural case for training a single multilingual model. In this work, we combined nine primary Indian languages, namely Hindi, Marathi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Gujarati.
A Low-latency All-neural Multilingual Model
Traditional ASR systems contain separate components for acoustic, pronunciation, and language models. While there have been attempts to make some or all of the traditional ASR components multilingual [
1
,
2
,
3
,
4
], this approach can be complex and difficult to scale. E2E ASR models
combine all three components into a single neural network
and promise scalability and ease of parameter sharing. Recent works have extended E2E models to be multilingual [
1
,
2
], but they did not address the need for real-time speech recognition, a key requirement for applications such as the Assistant,
Voice Search
and
GBoard dictation
. For this, we turned to
recent research
at Google that used a
Recurrent Neural Network Transducer
(RNN-T) model to achieve streaming E2E ASR. The RNN-T system outputs words one character at a time, just as if someone was
typing in real time
, however this was not multilingual. We built upon this architecture to develop a low-latency model for
multilingual
speech recognition.
[Left]
A traditional monolingual speech recognizer comprising of Acoustic, Pronunciation and Language Models for each language.
[Middle]
A traditional multilingual speech recognizer where the Acoustic and Pronunciation model is multilingual, while the Language model is language-specific.
[Right]
An E2E multilingual speech recognizer where the Acoustic, Pronunciation and Language Model is combined into a single multilingual model.
Large-Scale Data Challenges
Using large-scale, real-world data for training a multilingual model is complicated by data imbalance. Given the steep skew in the distribution of speakers across the languages and speech product maturity, it is not surprising to have varying amounts of transcribed data available per language. As a result, a multilingual model can tend to be more influenced by languages that are over-represented in the training set. This bias is more prominent in an E2E model, which unlike a traditional ASR system, does not have access to additional in-language text data and learns lexical characteristics of the languages solely from the audio training data.
Histogram of training data for the nine languages showing the steep skew in the data available.
We addressed this issue with a few architectural modifications. First, we provided an extra language identifier input, which is an external signal derived from the language locale of the training data; i.e. the language preference set in an individual’s phone. This signal is combined with the audio input as a
one-hot
feature vector. We hypothesize that the model is able to use the language vector not only to disambiguate the language but also to learn separate features for separate languages, as needed, which helped with data imbalance.
Building on the idea of language-specific representations within the global model, we further augmented the network architecture by allocating extra parameters per language in the form of
residual adapter modules
. Adapters helped fine-tune a global model on each language while maintaining parameter efficiency of a single global model, and in turn, improved performance.
[Left]
Multilingual RNN-T architecture with a language identifier.
[Middle]
Residual adapters inside the encoder. For a Tamil utterance, only the Tamil adapters are applied to each activation.
[Right]
Architecture details of the Residual Adapter modules. For more details please see our
paper
.
Putting all of these elements together, our multilingual model outperforms all the single-language recognizers, with especially large improvements in data-scarce languages like Kannada and Urdu. Moreover, since it is a streaming E2E model, it simplifies training and serving, and is also usable in low-latency applications like the Assistant. Building on this result, we hope to continue our research on multilingual ASRs for other language groups, to better assist our growing body of diverse users.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following for their contribution to this research: Tara N. Sainath, Eugene Weinstein, Bo Li, Shubham Toshniwal, Ron Weiss, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Yonghui Wu, Ankur Bapna, Zhifeng Chen, Seungji Lee, Meysam Bastani, Mikaela Grace, Pedro Moreno, Yanzhang (Ryan) He, Khe Chai Sim.
Contributing Data to Deepfake Detection Research
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
Posted by Nick Dufour, Google Research and Andrew Gully, Jigsaw
Deep learning has given rise to technologies that would have been thought impossible only a handful of years ago. Modern generative models are one example of these, capable of synthesizing hyperrealistic images, speech, music, and even video. These models have found use in a wide variety of applications, including making the world
more accessible through text-to-speech
, and helping
generate training data for medical imaging
.
Like any transformative technology, this has created new challenges. So-called "
deepfakes
"—produced by deep generative models that can manipulate video and audio clips—are one of these. Since their first appearance in late 2017, many open-source deepfake generation methods have emerged, leading to a growing number of synthesized media clips. While many are likely intended to be humorous, others could be harmful to individuals and society.
Google considers these issues seriously. As we published in our
AI Principles
last year, we are committed to developing AI best practices to mitigate the potential for harm and abuse. Last January, we announced our release of a
dataset of synthetic speech
in support of an
international challenge
to develop high-performance fake audio detectors. The dataset was downloaded by more than 150 research and industry organizations as part of the challenge, and is now freely available to the public.
Today, in collaboration with
Jigsaw
, we're announcing the release of a large dataset of visual deepfakes we've produced that has been incorporated into the Technical University of Munich and the University Federico II of Naples’ new
FaceForensics benchmark
, an effort that Google co-sponsors. The incorporation of these data into the FaceForensics video benchmark is in partnership with leading researchers, including
Prof. Matthias Niessner
,
Prof. Luisa Verdoliva
and the
FaceForensics team
.
You can download the data on the
FaceForensics github page
.
A sample of videos from Google’s contribution to the FaceForensics benchmark. To generate these, pairs of actors were selected randomly and deep neural networks swapped the face of one actor onto the head of another.
To make this dataset, over the past year we worked with paid and consenting actors to record hundreds of videos. Using publicly available deepfake generation methods, we then created thousands of deepfakes from these videos. The resulting videos, real and fake, comprise our contribution, which we created to directly support deepfake detection efforts. As part of the FaceForensics benchmark, this dataset is now available, free to the research community, for use in developing synthetic video detection methods.
Actors were filmed in a variety of scenes. Some of these actors are pictured here (top) with an example deepfake (bottom), which can be a subtle or drastic change, depending on the other actor used to create them.
Since the field is moving quickly, we'll add to this dataset as deepfake technology evolves over time, and we’ll continue to work with partners in this space. We firmly believe in supporting a thriving research community around mitigating potential harms from misuses of synthetic media, and today's release of our deepfake dataset in the FaceForensics benchmark is an important step in that direction.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to all our team members and collaborators who work on this project with us: Daisy Stanton, Per Karlsson, Alexey Victor Vorobyov, Thomas Leung, Jeremiah "Spudde" Childs, Christoph Bregler, Andreas Roessler, Davide Cozzolino, Justus Thies, Luisa Verdoliva, Matthias Niessner, and the hard-working actors and film crew who helped make this dataset possible.
An Inside Look at Flood Forecasting
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Sella Nevo, Senior Software Engineer, Google Research, Tel Aviv
Several years ago, we identified flood forecasts as a unique opportunity to improve people’s lives, and began looking into how Google’s infrastructure and machine learning expertise can help in this field. Last year, we started our
flood forecasting pilot
in the Patna region, and since then we have
expanded our flood forecasting coverage
, as part of our larger
AI for Social Good
efforts. In this post, we discuss some of the technology and methodology behind this effort.
The Inundation Model
A critical step in developing an accurate flood forecasting system is to develop inundation models, which use either a measurement or a forecast of the water level in a river as an input, and simulate the water behavior across the floodplain.
A 3D visualization of a hydraulic model simulating various river conditions.
This allows us to translate current or future river conditions, to highly spatially accurate risk maps - which tell us what areas will be flooded and what areas will be safe. Inundation models depend on four major components, each with its own challenges and innovations:
Real-time Water Level Measurements
To run these models operationally, we need to know what is happening on the ground in real-time, and thus we rely on partnerships with the relevant government agencies to receive timely and accurate information. Our first governmental partner is the
Indian Central Water Commission
(CWC), which measures water levels hourly in over a thousand
stream gauges
across all of India, aggregates this data, and produces forecasts based on upstream measurements. The CWC provides these real-time river measurements and forecasts, which are then used as inputs for our models.
CWC employees measuring water level and discharge near Lucknow, India.
Elevation Map Creation
Once we know how much water is in a river, it is critical that the models have a good map of the terrain. High-resolution
digital elevation models
(DEMs) are incredibly useful for a wide range of applications in the earth sciences, but are still difficult to acquire in most of the world, especially for flood forecasting. This is because meter-wide features of the ground conditions can create a critical difference in the resulting flooding (
embankments
are one exceptionally important example), but publicly accessible global DEMs have resolutions of tens of meters. To help address this challenge, we’ve developed a novel methodology to produce high resolution DEMs based on completely standard optical imagery.
We start with the large and varied collection of satellite images used in Google Maps. Correlating and aligning the images in large batches, we simultaneously optimize for satellite camera model corrections (for orientation errors, etc.) and for coarse terrain elevation. We then use the corrected camera models to create a depth map for each image. To make the elevation map, we optimally fuse the depth maps together at each location. Finally, we remove objects such as trees and bridges so that they don’t block water flow in our simulations. This can be done manually or by training convolutional neural networks that can identify where the terrain elevations need to be interpolated. The result is a roughly 1 meter DEM, which can be used to run hydraulic models.
A 30m SRTM-based DEM of the Yamuna river compared to a Google-generated 1m DEM of the same area.
Hydraulic Modeling
Once we have both these inputs - the riverine measurements and forecasts, and the elevation map - we can begin the modeling itself, which can be divided into two main components. The first and most substantial component is the physics-based hydraulic model, which updates the location and velocity of the water through time based on (an approximated) computation of the laws of physics. Specifically, we’ve implemented a solver for the 2D form of the shallow-water
Saint-Venant equations
. These models are suitably accurate when given accurate inputs and run at high resolutions, but their computational complexity creates challenges - it is proportional to the cube of the resolution desired. That is, if you double the resolution, you’ll need roughly 8 times as much processing time. Since we’re committed to the high-resolution required for highly accurate forecasts, this can lead to unscalable computational costs, even for Google!
To help address this problem, we’ve created a unique implementation of our hydraulic model, optimized for
Tensor Processing Units
(TPUs). While TPUs were optimized for neural networks (rather than differential equation solvers like our hydraulic model), their highly parallelized nature leads to the performance per TPU core being 85x times faster than the performance per CPU core. For additional efficiency improvements, we’re also looking at using machine learning to replace some of the physics-based algorithmics, extending
data-driven discretization
to two-dimensional hydraulic models, so we can support even larger grids and cover even more people.
A snapshot of a TPU-based simulation of flooding in Goalpara, mid-event.
As mentioned earlier, the hydraulic model is only one component of our inundation forecasts. We’ve repeatedly found locations where our hydraulic models are not sufficiently accurate - whether that’s due to inaccuracies in the DEM, breaches in embankments, or unexpected water sources. Our goal is to find effective ways to reduce these errors. For this purpose, we added a predictive inundation model, based on historical measurements. Since 2014, the
European Space Agency
has been operating a satellite constellation named
Sentinel-1
with C-band
Synthetic-Aperture Radar
(SAR) instruments. SAR imagery is great at identifying inundation, and can do so regardless of weather conditions and clouds. Based on this valuable data set, we correlate historical water level measurements with historical inundations, allowing us to identify consistent corrections to our hydraulic model. Based on the outputs of both components, we can estimate which disagreements are due to genuine ground condition changes, and which are due to modeling inaccuracies.
Flood warnings across Google’s interfaces.
Looking Forward
We still have a lot to do to fully realize the benefits of our inundation models. First and foremost, we’re working hard to expand the coverage of our operational systems, both within India and to new countries. There’s also a lot more information we want to be able to provide in real time, including forecasted flood depth, temporal information and more. Additionally, we’re researching how to best convey this information to individuals to maximize clarity and encourage them to take the necessary protective actions.
Computationally, while the inundation model is a good tool for improving the spatial resolution (and therefore the accuracy and reliability) of existing flood forecasts, multiple governmental agencies and international organizations we’ve spoken to are concerned about areas that do not have access to effective flood forecasts at all, or whose forecasts don’t provide enough lead time for effective response. In parallel to our work on the inundation model, we’re working on some basic research into improved hydrologic models, which we hope will allow governments not only to produce more spatially accurate forecasts, but also achieve longer preparation time.
Hydrologic models accept as inputs things like precipitation, solar radiation, soil moisture and the like, and produce a forecast for the river discharge (among other things), days into the future. These models are traditionally implemented using a combination of conceptual models approximating different core processes such as snowmelt, surface runoff, evapotranspiration and more.
The core processes of a hydrologic model. Designed by Daniel Klotz, JKU Institute for Machine Learning.
These models also traditionally require a large amount of manual calibration, and tend to underperform in data scarce regions. We are exploring how
multi-task learning
can be used to address both of these problems — making hydrologic models both more scalable, and more accurate. In research collaboration with
JKU Institute For Machine Learning
group under Sepp Hochreiter on developing ML-based hydrologic models,
Kratzert et al.
show how
LSTMs
perform better than all benchmarked classic hydrologic models.
The distribution of
NSE
scores on basins across the United States for various models, showing the proposed EA-LSTM consistently outperforming a wide range of commonly used models.
Though this work is still in the basic research stage and not yet operational, we think it is an important first step, and hope it can already be useful for other researchers and hydrologists. It’s an incredible privilege to take part in the large eco-system of researchers, governments, and NGOs working to reduce the harms of flooding. We’re excited about the potential impact this type of research can provide, and look forward to where research in this field will go.
Acknowledgements
There are many people who contributed to this large effort, and we’d like to highlight some of the key contributors: Aaron Yonas, Adi Mano, Ajai Tirumali, Avinatan Hassidim, Carla Bromberg, Damien Pierce, Gal Elidan, Guy Shalev, John Anderson, Karan Agarwal, Kartik Murthy, Manan Singhi, Mor Schlesinger, Ofir Reich, Oleg Zlydenko, Pete Giencke, Piyush Poddar, Ruha Devanesan, Slava Salasin, Varun Gulshan, Vova Anisimov, Yossi Matias, Yi-fan Chen, Yotam Gigi, Yusef Shafi, Zach Moshe and Zvika Ben-Haim.
Project Ihmehimmeli: Temporal Coding in Spiking Neural Networks
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Posted by Iulia-Maria Comșa and Krzysztof Potempa, Research Engineers, Google Research, Zürich
The discoveries being made regularly in neuroscience are an ongoing source of inspiration for creating more efficient artificial neural networks that process information in the same way as biological organisms. These networks have recently achieved resounding success in domains ranging from playing board and
video
games
to
fine-grained understanding of video
. However, there is one fundamental aspect of biological brains that artificial neural networks are not yet fully leveraging: temporal encoding of information. Preserving temporal information allows a better representation of dynamic features, such as sounds, and enables fast responses to events that may occur at any moment. Furthermore, despite the fact that biological systems can consist of billions of neurons, information can be carried by a single signal (‘spike’) fired by an individual neuron, with information encoded in the timing of the signal itself.
Based on this biological insight, project Ihmehimmeli explores how
artificial spiking neural networks
can exploit temporal dynamics using various architectures and learning settings. “Ihmehimmeli” is a Finnish tongue-in-cheek word for a complex tool or a machine element whose purpose is not immediately easy to grasp. The essence of this word captures our aim to build complex recurrent neural network architectures with temporal encoding of information. We use artificial spiking networks with a temporal coding scheme, in which more interesting or surprising information, such as louder sounds or brighter colours, causes earlier neuronal spikes. Along the information processing hierarchy, the winning neurons are those that spike first. Such an encoding can naturally implement a classification scheme where input features are encoded in the spike times of their corresponding input neurons, while the output class is encoded by the output neuron that spikes earliest.
The Ihmehimmeli project team holding a
himmeli
, a symbol for the aim to build recurrent neural network architectures with temporal encoding of information.
We recently
published
and
open-sourced
a model in which we demonstrated the computational capabilities of fully connected spiking networks that operate using temporal coding. Our model uses a
biologically-inspired
synaptic
transfer function
, where the electric potential on the membrane of a neuron rises and gradually decays over time in response to an incoming signal, until there is a spike. The strength of the associated change is controlled by the "weight" of the connection, which represents the synapse efficiency. Crucially, this formulation allows exact derivatives of postsynaptic spike times with respect to presynaptic spike times and weights. The process of training the network consists of adjusting the weights between neurons, which in turn leads to adjusted spike times across the network. Much like in conventional artificial neural networks, this was done using backpropagation. We used synchronization pulses, whose timing is also learned with backpropagation, to provide a temporal reference to the network.
We trained the network on classic machine learning benchmarks, with features encoded in time. The spiking network successfully learned to solve noisy Boolean logic problems and achieved a test accuracy of 97.96% on
MNIST
, a result comparable to conventional fully connected networks with the same architecture. However, unlike conventional networks, our spiking network uses an encoding that is in general more biologically-plausible, and, for a small trade-off in accuracy, can compute the result in a highly energy-efficient manner, as detailed below.
While training the spiking network on MNIST, we observed the neural network spontaneously shift between two operating regimes. Early during training, the network exhibited a slow and highly accurate regime, where almost all neurons fired before the network made a decision. Later in training, the network spontaneously shifted into a fast but slightly less accurate regime. This behaviour was intriguing, as we did not optimize for it explicitly. Thus spiking networks can, in a sense, be “deliberative”, or make a snap decision on the spot. This is reminiscent of the trade-off between speed and accuracy in human decision-making.
A slow (“deliberative”) network (
top
) and a fast (“impulsive”) network (
bottom
) classifying the same MNIST digit. The figures show a raster plot of spike times of individual neurons in individual layers, with synchronization pulses shown in orange. In this example, both networks classify the digit correctly; overall, the “slow” network achieves better accuracy than the “fast” network.
We were also able to
recover representations
of the digits learned by the spiking network by gradually adjusting a blank input image to maximize the response of a target output neuron. This indicates that the network learns human-like representations of the digits, as opposed to other possible combinations of pixels that might look “alien” to people. Having interpretable representations is important in order to understand what the network is truly learning and to prevent a small change in input from causing a large change in the result.
How the network “imagines” the digits 0, 1, 3 and 7.
This work is one example of an initial step that project Ihmehimmeli is taking in exploring the potential of time-based biology-inspired computing. In other on-going experiments, we are training spiking networks with temporal coding to control the walking of an artificial insect in a virtual environment, or taking inspiration from the development of the neural system to train a 2D spiking grid to predict words using axonal growth. Our goal is to increase our familiarity with the mechanisms that nature has evolved for natural intelligence, enabling the exploration of time-based artificial neural networks with varying internal states and state transitions.
Acknowledgements
The work described here was authored by Iulia Comsa, Krzysztof Potempa, Luca Versari, Thomas Fischbacher, Andrea Gesmundo and Jyrki Alakuijala. We are grateful for all discussions and feedback on this work that we received from our colleagues at Google.
Google at Interspeech 2019
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Andrew Helton, Editor, Google Research Communications
This week, Graz, Austria hosts the
20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association
(Interspeech 2019), one of the world‘s most extensive conferences on the research and engineering for spoken language processing. Over 2,000 experts in speech-related research fields gather to take part in oral presentations and poster sessions and to collaborate with streamed events across the globe.
As a Gold Sponsor of Interspeech 2019, we are excited to present 30 research publications, and demonstrate some of the impact speech technology has made in our products, from accessible, automatic video captioning to a more robust, reliable Google Assistant. If you’re attending Interspeech 2019, we hope that you’ll stop by the Google booth to meet our researchers and discuss projects and opportunities at Google that go into solving interesting problems for billions of people. Our researchers will also be on hand to discuss Google Cloud Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-text, demo
Parrotron
, and more. You can also learn more about the Google research being presented at Interspeech 2019 below (Google affiliations in
blue
).
Organizing Committee
includes:
Michiel Bacchiani
Technical Program Committee
includes:
Tara Sainath
Tutorials
Neural Machine Translation
Organizers include:
Wolfgang Macherey
,
Yuan Cao
Accepted Publications
Building Large-Vocabulary ASR Systems for Languages Without Any Audio Training Data
Manasa Prasad
,
Daan van Esch
,
Sandy Ritchie
,
Jonas Fromseier Mortensen
Multi-Microphone Adaptive Noise Cancellation for Robust Hotword Detection
Yiteng Huang
,
Turaj Shabestary
,
Alexander Gruenstein
,
Li Wan
Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation with a Sequence-to-Sequence Model
Ye Jia
,
Ron Weiss
,
Fadi Biadsy
,
Wolfgang Macherey
,
Melvin Johnson
,
Zhifeng Chen
,
Yonghui Wu
Improving Keyword Spotting and Language Identification via Neural Architecture Search at Scale
Hanna Mazzawi
,
Javier Gonzalvo
,
Aleks Kracun
,
Prashant Sridhar
,
Niranjan Subrahmanya
,
Ignacio Lopez Moreno
,
Hyun Jin Park
,
Patrick Violette
Shallow-Fusion End-to-End Contextual Biasing
Ding Zhao
,
Tara Sainath
,
David Rybach
,
Pat Rondon
,
Deepti Bhatia
,
Bo Li
,
Ruoming Pang
VoiceFilter: Targeted Voice Separation by Speaker-Conditioned Spectrogram Masking
Quan Wang
, Hannah Muckenhirn,
Kevin Wilson
,
Prashant Sridhar
,
Zelin Wu
,
John Hershey
,
Rif Saurous
,
Ron Weiss
,
Ye Jia
,
Ignacio Lopez Moreno
SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition
Daniel Park
,
William Chan
,
Yu Zhang
,
Chung-Cheng Chiu
,
Barret Zoph
,
Ekin Dogus Cubuk
,
Quoc Le
Two-Pass End-to-End Speech Recognition
Ruoming Pang
,
Tara Sainath
,
David Rybach
,
Yanzhang He
,
Rohit Prabhavalkar
,
Mirko Visontai
,
Qiao Liang
,
Trevor Strohman
,
Yonghui Wu
,
Ian McGraw
,
Chung-Cheng Chiu
On the Choice of Modeling Unit for Sequence-to-Sequence Speech Recognition
Kazuki Irie,
Rohit Prabhavalkar
,
Anjuli Kannan
,
Antoine Bruguier
,
David Rybach
,
Patrick Nguyen
Contextual Recovery of Out-of-Lattice Named Entities in Automatic Speech Recognition
Jack Serrino,
Leonid Velikovich
,
Petar Aleksic
,
Cyril Allauzen
Joint Speech Recognition and Speaker Diarization via Sequence Transduction
Laurent El Shafey
,
Hagen Soltau
,
Izhak Shafran
Personalizing ASR for Dysarthric and Accented Speech with Limited Data
Joel Shor
,
Dotan Emanuel
,
Oran Lang
,
Omry Tuval
,
Michael Brenner
,
Julie Cattiau
, Fernando Vieira, Maeve McNally, Taylor Charbonneau, Melissa Nollstadt,
Avinatan Hassidim
,
Yossi Matias
An Investigation Into On-Device Personalization of End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition Models
Khe Chai Sim
,
Petr Zadrazil
,
Francoise Beaufays
Salient Speech Representations Based on Cloned Networks
Bastiaan Kleijn,
Felicia Lim
,
Michael Chinen
,
Jan Skoglund
Cross-Lingual Consistency of Phonological Features: An Empirical Study
Cibu Johny
,
Alexander Gutkin
,
Martin Jansche
LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech
Heiga Zen
,
Viet Dang
,
Robert Clark
,
Yu Zhang
,
Ron Weiss
,
Ye Jia
,
Zhifeng Chen
,
Yonghui Wu
Improving Performance of End-to-End ASR on Numeric Sequences
Cal Peyser
,
Hao Zhang
,
Tara Sainath
,
Zelin Wu
Developing Pronunciation Models in New Languages Faster by Exploiting Common Grapheme-to-Phoneme Correspondences Across Languages
Harry Bleyan
,
Sandy Ritchie
,
Jonas Fromseier Mortensen
,
Daan van Esch
Phoneme-Based Contextualization for Cross-Lingual Speech Recognition in End-to-End Models
Ke Hu
,
Antoine Bruguier
,
Tara Sainath
,
Rohit Prabhavalkar
,
Golan Pundak
Fréchet Audio Distance: A Reference-free Metric for Evaluating Music Enhancement Algorithms
Kevin Kilgour
,
Mauricio Zuluaga
,
Dominik Roblek
,
Matthew Sharifi
Learning to Speak Fluently in a Foreign Language: Multilingual Speech Synthesis and Cross-Language Voice Cloning
Yu Zhang
,
Ron Weiss
,
Heiga Zen
,
Yonghui Wu
,
Zhifeng Chen
,
RJ Skerry-Ryan
,
Ye Jia
,
Andrew Rosenberg
,
Bhuvana Ramabhadran
Sampling from Stochastic Finite Automata with Applications to CTC Decoding
Martin Jansche
,
Alexander Gutkin
Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Recognition with a Streaming End-to-End Model
Anjuli Kannan
,
Arindrima Datta
,
Tara Sainath
,
Eugene Weinstein
,
Bhuvana Ramabhadran
,
Yonghui Wu
,
Ankur Bapna
,
Zhifeng Chen
,
SeungJi Lee
A Real-Time Wideband Neural Vocoder at 1.6 kb/s Using LPCNet
Jean-Marc Valin,
Jan Skoglund
Low-Dimensional Bottleneck Features for On-Device Continuous Speech Recognition
David Ramsay,
Kevin Kilgour
,
Dominik Roblek
,
Matthew Sharif
Unified Verbalization for Speech Recognition & Synthesis Across Languages
Sandy Ritchie
,
Richard Sproat
,
Kyle Gorman
,
Daan van Esch
,
Christian Schallhart
,
Nikos Bampounis
,
Benoit Brard
,
Jonas Mortensen
,
Amelia Holt
,
Eoin Mahon
Better Morphology Prediction for Better Speech Systems
(link to appear soon)
Dravyansh Sharma,
Melissa Wilson
,
Antoine Bruguier
Dual Encoder Classifier Models as Constraints in Neural Text Normalization
Ajda Gokcen,
Hao Zhang
,
Richard Sproat
Large-Scale Visual Speech Recognition
Brendan Shillingford, Yannis Assael, Matthew Hoffman, Thomas Paine, Cían Hughes,
Utsav Prabhu
,
Hank Liao
,
Hasim Sak
,
Kanishka Rao
, Lorrayne Bennett,
Marie Mulville
, Ben Coppin,
Ben Laurie
,
Andrew Senior
, Nando de Freitas
Parrotron: An End-to-End Speech-to-Speech Conversion Model and its Applications to Hearing-Impaired Speech and Speech Separation
Fadi Biadsy
,
Ron Weiss
,
Pedro Moreno
,
Dimitri Kanevsky
,
Ye Jia
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