Exploring Attention Mechanism for Acoustic-based Classification of Speech Utterances into System-directed and Non-system-directed
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Voice controlled virtual assistants (VAs) are now available in smartphones, cars, and standalone devices in homes. In most cases, the user needs to first "wake-up" the VA by saying a particular word/phrase every time he/she wants the VA to do something. Eliminating the need for saying the wake-up word for every interaction could improve the user experience. This would require the VA to have the capability of understanding whether the user is talking to it or not. In other words, the challenge is to distinguish between system-directed and non-system-directed speech utterances. In this paper, we present a number of neural network architectures for tackling this classification problem based on using only the acoustic signal. It is shown that a model comprised of convolutional, recurrent, and feed-forward layers can achieve an equal error rate (EER) of below 20% for this task. In addition, we investigate the use of an attention mechanism for helping the model to focus on the more important parts of the signal and to improve handling of variable length inputs sequences. The results show that the proposed attention mechanism significantly improves the model accuracy achieving an EER of 16.25% and 15.62% on two distinct realistic datasets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".