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Inferring Emphasis for Real Voice Data: An Attentive Multimodal Neural Network Approach

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MultiMedia Modeling (MMM 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11962))

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Abstract

To understand speakers’ attitudes and intentions in real Voice Dialogue Applications (VDAs), effective emphasis inference from users’ queries may play an important role. However, in VDAs, there are tremendous amount of uncertain speakers with a great diversity of users’ dialects, expression preferences, which challenge the traditional emphasis detection methods. In this paper, to better infer emphasis for real voice data, we propose an attentive multimodal neural network. Specifically, first, beside the acoustic features, extensive textual features are applied in modelling. Then, considering the feature in-dependency, we model the multi-modal features utilizing a Multi-path convolutional neural network (MCNN). Furthermore, combining high-level multi-modal features, we train an emphasis classifier by attending on the textual features with an attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory network (ABLSTM), to comprehensively learn discriminative features from diverse users. Our experimental study based on a real-world dataset collected from Sogou Voice Assistant (https://yy.sogou.com/) show that our method outperforms (over 1.0–15.5% in terms of F1 measure) alternative baselines.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.apple.com/cn/ios/siri/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.nuance.com/index.html.

  3. 3.

    https://developer.amazon.com/alexa/.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Tiangong Institute for Intelligent Computing, Tsinghua University and the state key program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (No. 61831022).

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Correspondence to Jia Jia .

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Zhou, S. et al. (2020). Inferring Emphasis for Real Voice Data: An Attentive Multimodal Neural Network Approach. In: Ro, Y., et al. MultiMedia Modeling. MMM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11962. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37734-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37734-2_5

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