ISCA Archive Interspeech 2018
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2018

Unsupervised Word Segmentation from Speech with Attention

Pierre Godard, Marcely Zanon Boito, Lucas Ondel, Alexandre Berard, François Yvon, Aline Villavicencio, Laurent Besacier

We present a first attempt to perform attentional word segmentation from speech signal, with the final goal of automatically identifying lexical units in a low-resource, unwritten language (UL). Our methodology assumes a pairing between recordings in the UL with translations in a well-resourced language. It uses Acoustic Unit Discovery (AUD) to convert speech into a pseudo-phones sequence that is segmented using neural soft alignments (from a neural machine translation model). Evaluation uses an actual Bantu UL, Mboshi; comparisons to monolingual and bilingual baselines illustrate the potential of attentional word segmentation for language documentation.