Toward Joint Language Modeling for Speech Units and Text

Ju-Chieh Chou, Chung-Ming Chien, Wei-Ning Hsu, Karen Livescu, Arun Babu, Alexis Conneau, Alexei Baevski, Michael Auli


Abstract
Speech and text are two major forms of human language. The research community has been focusing on mapping speech to text or vice versa for many years. However, in the field of language modeling, very little effort has been made to model them jointly. In light of this, we explore joint language modeling for speech units and text. Specifically, we compare different speech tokenizers to transform continuous speech signals into discrete units and use different methods to construct mixed speech-text data. We introduce automatic metrics to evaluate how well the joint LM mixes speech and text. We also fine-tune the LM on downstream spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks with different modalities (speech or text) and test its performance to assess the model’s learning of shared representations. Our results show that by mixing speech units and text with our proposed mixing techniques, the joint LM improves over a speech-only baseline on SLU tasks and shows zero-shot cross-modal transferability.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.438
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6582–6593
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.438
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.438
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ju-Chieh Chou, Chung-Ming Chien, Wei-Ning Hsu, Karen Livescu, Arun Babu, Alexis Conneau, Alexei Baevski, and Michael Auli. 2023. Toward Joint Language Modeling for Speech Units and Text. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 6582–6593, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Toward Joint Language Modeling for Speech Units and Text (Chou et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.438.pdf