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arxiv 2105.01786 v1 pith:TCYHO6OF submitted 2021-05-04 eess.AS cs.CLcs.SD

Voice Conversion Based Speaker Normalization for Acoustic Unit Discovery

classification eess.AS cs.CLcs.SD
keywords speakernormalizationdiscoveryunitacousticapproachinputspeech
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Discovering speaker independent acoustic units purely from spoken input is known to be a hard problem. In this work we propose an unsupervised speaker normalization technique prior to unit discovery. It is based on separating speaker related from content induced variations in a speech signal with an adversarial contrastive predictive coding approach. This technique does neither require transcribed speech nor speaker labels, and, furthermore, can be trained in a multilingual fashion, thus achieving speaker normalization even if only few unlabeled data is available from the target language. The speaker normalization is done by mapping all utterances to a medoid style which is representative for the whole database. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by conducting acoustic unit discovery with a hidden Markov model variational autoencoder noting, however, that the proposed speaker normalization can serve as a front end to any unit discovery system. Experiments on English, Yoruba and Mboshi show improvements compared to using non-normalized input.

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