ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023

BeAts: Bengali Speech Acts Recognition using Multimodal Attention Fusion

Ahana Deb, Sayan Nag, Ayan Mahapatra, Soumitri Chattopadhyay, Aritra Marik, Pijush Kanti Gayen, Shankha Sanyal, Archi Banerjee, Samir Karmakar

Spoken languages often utilise intonation, rhythm, intensity, and structure, to communicate intention, which can be interpreted differently depending on the rhythm of speech of their utterance. These speech acts provide the foundation of communication and are unique in expression to the language. Recent advancements in attention-based models, demonstrating their ability to learn powerful representations from multilingual datasets, have performed well in speech tasks and are ideal to model specific tasks in low resource languages. Here, we develop a novel multimodal approach combining two models, wav2vec2.0 for audio and MarianMT for text translation, by using multimodal attention fusion to predict speech acts in our prepared Bengali speech corpus. We also show that our model BeAts (Bengali speech acts recognition using Multimodal Attention Fusion) significantly outperforms both the unimodal baseline using only speech data and a simpler bimodal fusion using both speech and text data.