2022/04/27 by Tzeviya Sylvia Fuchs, Yedid Hoshen, Fuchs, Tzeviya Sylvia +3
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Music and Audio Processing #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and Audio Processing #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.13094
openalex publication_date 2022/04/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we propose an unsupervised kNN-based approach for word segmentation in speech utterances. Our method relies on self-supervised pre-trained speech representations, and compares each audio segment of a given utterance to its K nearest neighbors within the training set. Our main assumption is that a segment containing more than one word would occur less often than a segment containing a single word. Our method does not require phoneme discovery and is able to operate directly on pre-trained audio representations. This is in contrast to current methods that use a two-stage approach; first detecting the phonemes in the utterance and then detecting word-boundaries according to statistics calculated on phoneme patterns. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate improved results over previous single-stage methods and competitive results on state-of-the-art two-stage methods.