Bridging the Gap between Audio and Text using Parallel-attention for User-defined Keyword Spotting

This paper proposes a novel user-defined keyword spotting framework that accurately detects audio keywords based on text enrollment. Since audio data possesses additional acoustic information compared to text, there are discrepancies between these two modalities. To address this challenge, we present ParallelKWS, which utilises self- and cross-attention in a parallel architecture to effectively capture information both within and across the two modalities. We further propose a phoneme duration-based alignment loss that enforces the sequential correspondence between audio and text features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets in both seen and unseen domains, without incorporating extra data beyond the dataset used in previous studies.

Disentangling Structure and Style: Political Bias Detection in News by Inducing Document Hierarchy

We address an important gap in detection of political bias in news articles. Previous works that perform supervised document classification can be biased towards the writing style of each news outlet, leading to overfitting and limited generalizability. Our approach overcomes this limitation by considering both the sentence-level semantics and the document-level rhetorical structure, resulting in a more robust and style-agnostic approach to detecting political bias in news articles. We introduce a novel multi-head hierarchical attention model that effectively encodes the structure of long documents through a diverse ensemble of attention heads. While journalism follows a formalized rhetorical structure, the writing style may vary by news outlet. We demonstrate that our method overcomes this domain dependency and outperforms previous approaches for robustness and accuracy. Further analysis demonstrates the ability of our model to capture the discourse structures commonly used in the journalism domain.

Metric Learning for User-defined Keyword Spotting

The goal of this work is to detect new spoken terms defined by users. While most previous works address Keyword Spotting (KWS) as a closed-set classification problem, this limits their transferability to unseen terms. The ability to define custom keywords has advantages in terms of user experience. In this paper, we propose a metric learning-based training strategy for user-defined keyword spotting. In particular, we make the following contributions: (1) we construct a large-scale keyword dataset with an existing speech corpus and propose a filtering method to remove data that degrade model training; (2) we propose a metric learning-based two-stage training strategy, and demonstrate that the proposed method improves the performance on the user-defined keyword spotting task by enriching their representations; (3) to facilitate the fair comparison in the user-defined KWS field, we propose unified evaluation protocol and metrics. Our proposed system does not require an incremental training on the user-defined keywords, and outperforms previous works by a significant margin on the Google Speech Commands dataset using the proposed as well as the existing metrics.