Actualités

Thibault Roux organisera un débat à propos du sujet ci-dessous: « Les progrès récents de la technologie ont soulevé beaucoup de questionnements et d’inquiétudes vis-à-vis de l’impact sur nos sociétés. De nombreuses personnes s’inquiètent de son utilisation militaire, pour la surveillance de masse ou de la désinformation. D’un point de vue plus global, Nick Bostrom, philosophe, théorise l’hypothèse du monde vulnérable qui prédit que la Science détruira l’humanité.Dans ce débat, nous interrogerons nos propres biais en tant que chercheurs et chercheuses, et tenterons de répondre aux questions éthiques que soulève cette hypothèse. Est-ce que la Science est une menace pour l’humanité ? Faut-il arrêter la Science ? Ou plus sérieusement, peut-on trouver une solution pour ne pas s’autodétruire ? »

La prochaine réunion SLG aura lieu en salle S5 le jeudi 1er février, de 12h00 à 13h00. Ryan Whetten y présentera ses travaux, dont vous trouverez une brève introduction ci-dessous. ——————————————————————— Open Implementation and Study of BEST-RQ for Speech Processing Abstract: Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has proven to be useful in various speech tasks. However, these methods are generally very demanding in terms of data, memory, and computational resources. Recently, Google came out with a model called BEST-RQ (BERT-based Speech pre-Training with Random-projection Quantizer). Despite BEST-RQ’s great performance and simplicity, details are lacking in the original paper and there is no official easy-to-use open-source implementation. Furthermore, BEST-RQ has not been evaluated on other downstream tasks aside from ASR. In this presentation, we will discuss the details of my implementation of BEST-RQ and then see results from our preliminary study on four downstream tasks. Results show that a random projection quantizer can achieve similar downstream performance as wav2vec 2.0 while decreasing training time by over a factor of two.

On 18 January from 12 am, we will host a talk from Dr. Paul Gauthier Noé on « Explaining probabilistic predictions … ». The presentation will be hosted on room S6.   More details will follow…   Bio: Paul Gauthier Noe just received a PhD in Computer Science in Avignon Université under the supervision of Prof. Jean-François Bonastre and Dr. Driss Matrouf. He was working for the international JST-ANR VoicePersonae project and his main research interests are Speaker verification, Bayesian decision theory, Calibration of probabilities and Privacy in Speech.

On 12 January from 12 am, we will host a virtual talk from Dr. Fenna Poletiek from Institute of Psychology at Leiden University on « Language learning in the lab ».   The presentation will be hosted on room S6.   Abstract: Language learning in the lab Language learning skills have been considered a defining feature of humanness. In this view language cannot be acquired by mere associative or statistical learning processes, only, like many other skills are learned by human and nonhuman primates during development. Indeed, the high (recursive) complexity of human grammars have been shown to make them impossible to learn by exposure to language exemplars only. Some research suggests, however, that at least some statistical learning is recruited in language acquisition (Perruchet & Pacton, 2006). And primates have been shown to mimic complex grammatical patterns after being trained on a sequence of stimulus responses (Rey et al., 2012). We performed series of studies with artificial languages in the lab, to investigate associative and statistical learning processes that support language learning. The results thus far suggest a fine tuned cooperation between three crucial features of the natural language learning process: first, learning proceeds ‘starting small’ with short simple sentences growing in complexity Plus d'infos

Le prochain SLG meeting se tiendra en salle S1 le jeudi 21 décembre, de 12h00 à 13h00.   Nous aurons le plaisir d’accueillir St Germes BENGONO OBIANG, doctorant travaillant sur le traitement de la parole, plus particulièrement sur la reconnaissance des tons dans les langues peu dotées. Il est encadré par Norbert TSOPZE et Paulin MELATAGIA de l’Université de Yaoundé 1, ainsi que par Jean-François BONASTRE et Tania JIMENEZ du LIA.   Résumé : Many sub-Saharan African languages are categorized as tone languages and for the most part, they are classified as low resource languages due to the limited resources and tools available to process these languages. Identifying the tone associated with a syllable is therefore a key challenge for speech recognition in these languages. We propose models that automate the recognition of tones in continuous speech that can easily be incorporated into a speech recognition pipeline for these languages. We have investigated different neural architectures as well as several features extraction algorithms in speech (Filter banks, Leaf, Cestrogram, MFCC). In the context of low-resource languages, we also evaluated Wav2vec models for this task. In this work, we use a public speech recognition dataset on Yoruba. As for the results, Plus d'infos