CLSP Fall Seminar Series: Sharon Goldwater

Description

Sharon Goldwater, a professor in the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, will present a Center for Language and Speech Processing seminar titled "Analyzing Representations of Self-Supervised Speech Models."

Abstract:

Recent advances in speech technology make heavy use of pre-trained models that learn from large quantities of raw (untranscribed) speech, using "self-supervised" (i.e., unsupervised) learning. These models learn to transform the acoustic input into a different representational format that makes supervised learning (for tasks such as transcription or even translation) much easier. However, what and how speech-relevant information is encoded in these representations is not well understood. I will talk about some work at various stages of completion in which my group is analyzing the structure of these representations, to gain a more systematic understanding of how word-level, phonetic, and speaker information is encoded.