On generative spoken language modeling from raw audio

Kushal Lakhotia, Eugene Kharitonov, Wei Ning Hsu, Yossi Adi, Adam Polyak, Benjamin Bolte, Tu Anh Nguyen, Jade Copet, Alexei Baevski, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Emmanuel Dupoux

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

141 Scopus citations

Abstract

We introduce Generative Spoken Language Modeling, the task of learning the acoustic and linguistic characteristics of a language from raw audio (no text, no labels), and a set of metrics to automatically evaluate the learned representations at acoustic and linguistic levels for both encoding and generation. We set up baseline systems consisting of a discrete speech encoder (returning pseudo-text units), a generative language model (trained on pseudo-text), and a speech decoder (generating a waveform from pseudo-text) all trained without supervision and validate the proposed metrics with human evaluation. Across 3 speech encoders (CPC, wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT), we find that the number of discrete units (50, 100, or 200) matters in a task-dependent and encoder-dependent way, and that some combinations approach text-based systems.1

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1336-1354
Number of pages19
JournalTransactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume9
DOIs
StatePublished - 6 Dec 2021
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics. Distributed under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

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