Modality Dropout for Multimodal Device Directed Speech Detection using Verbal and Non-Verbal Features
AuthorsGautam Krishna, Sameer Dharur, Oggi Rudovic, Pranay Dighe, Saurabh Adya, Ahmed Hussen Abdelaziz, Ahmed H Tewfik
AuthorsGautam Krishna, Sameer Dharur, Oggi Rudovic, Pranay Dighe, Saurabh Adya, Ahmed Hussen Abdelaziz, Ahmed H Tewfik
Device-directed speech detection (DDSD) is the binary classification task of distinguishing between queries directed at a voice assistant versus side conversation or background speech. State-of-the-art DDSD systems use verbal cues (for example, acoustic, text and/or automatic speech recognition system (ASR) features) to classify speech as device-directed or otherwise, and often have to contend with one or more of these modalities being unavailable when deployed in real-world settings. In this paper, we investigate fusion schemes for DDSD systems that can be made more robust to missing modalities. Concurrently, we study the use of non-verbal cues, specifically prosody features, in addition to verbal cues for DDSD. We present different approaches to combine scores and embeddings from prosody with the corresponding verbal cues, finding that prosody improves DDSD performance by up to 8.5% in terms of false acceptance rate (FA) at a given fixed operating point via non-linear intermediate fusion, while our use of modality dropout techniques improves the performance of these models by 7.4% in terms of FA when evaluated with missing modalities during inference time.
November 5, 2024research area Human-Computer Interaction, research area Speech and Natural Language ProcessingWorkshop at NeurIPS
This paper was accepted at the Adaptive Foundation Models (AFM) Workshop at NeurIPS 2024.
Follow-up conversations with virtual assistants (VAs) enable a user to seamlessly interact with a VA without the need to repeatedly invoke it using a keyword (after the first query). Therefore, accurate Device-Directed Speech Detection (DDSD) from the follow-up queries is critical for enabling naturalistic user experience. To this end, we explore the...
March 22, 2024research area Speech and Natural Language Processingconference ICASSP
We present an architecture for device-directed speech detection that treats the task as a text-generation problem. We use a multi-modal fusion approach that combines acoustic information from the recorded audio waveform with text and confidence information obtained from an automatic speech recognition system. The audio waveform is represented as a sequence of continuous embeddings by an audio encoder and presented as a prefix token to a...