Unsupervised Word Discovery: Boundary Detection with Clustering vs. Dynamic Programming

2024/09/22 by Malan, Simon, van Niekerk, Benjamin, Kamper, Herman · 2 citations
#Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Sound (cs.SD) #electronic engineering #information engineering

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.14486

Abstract

We look at the long-standing problem of segmenting unlabeled speech into word-like segments and clustering these into a lexicon. Several previous methods use a scoring model coupled with dynamic programming to find an optimal segmentation. Here we propose a much simpler strategy: we predict word boundaries using the dissimilarity between adjacent self-supervised features, then we cluster the predicted segments to construct a lexicon. For a fair comparison, we update the older ES-KMeans dynamic programming method with better features and boundary constraints. On the five-language ZeroSpeech benchmarks, our simple approach gives similar state-of-the-art results compared to the new ES-KMeans+ method, while being almost five times faster. Project webpage: https://s-malan.github.io/prom-seg-clus.

Cited by

• Unsupervised lexicon learning from speech is limited by representations rather than clustering
• Should Top-Down Clustering Affect Boundaries in Unsupervised Word Discovery?

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