Florian Lux


2022

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Language-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Low-Resource Text-to-Speech with Articulatory Features
Florian Lux | Thang Vu
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

While neural text-to-speech systems perform remarkably well in high-resource scenarios, they cannot be applied to the majority of the over 6,000 spoken languages in the world due to a lack of appropriate training data. In this work, we use embeddings derived from articulatory vectors rather than embeddings derived from phoneme identities to learn phoneme representations that hold across languages. In conjunction with language agnostic meta learning, this enables us to fine-tune a high-quality text-to-speech model on just 30 minutes of data in a previously unseen language spoken by a previously unseen speaker.

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Low-Resource Multilingual and Zero-Shot Multispeaker TTS
Florian Lux | Julia Koch | Ngoc Thang Vu
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

While neural methods for text-to-speech (TTS) have shown great advances in modeling multiple speakers, even in zero-shot settings, the amount of data needed for those approaches is generally not feasible for the vast majority of the world’s over 6,000 spoken languages. In this work, we bring together the tasks of zero-shot voice cloning and multilingual low-resource TTS. Using the language agnostic meta learning (LAML) procedure and modifications to a TTS encoder, we show that it is possible for a system to learn speaking a new language using just 5 minutes of training data while retaining the ability to infer the voice of even unseen speakers in the newly learned language. We show the success of our proposed approach in terms of intelligibility, naturalness and similarity to target speaker using objective metrics as well as human studies and provide our code and trained models open source.

2020

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ADVISER: A Toolkit for Developing Multi-modal, Multi-domain and Socially-engaged Conversational Agents
Chia-Yu Li | Daniel Ortega | Dirk Väth | Florian Lux | Lindsey Vanderlyn | Maximilian Schmidt | Michael Neumann | Moritz Völkel | Pavel Denisov | Sabrina Jenne | Zorica Kacarevic | Ngoc Thang Vu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

We present ADVISER - an open-source, multi-domain dialog system toolkit that enables the development of multi-modal (incorporating speech, text and vision), socially-engaged (e.g. emotion recognition, engagement level prediction and backchanneling) conversational agents. The final Python-based implementation of our toolkit is flexible, easy to use, and easy to extend not only for technically experienced users, such as machine learning researchers, but also for less technically experienced users, such as linguists or cognitive scientists, thereby providing a flexible platform for collaborative research.

2019

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Multiclass Text Classification on Unbalanced, Sparse and Noisy Data
Tillmann Dönicke | Matthias Damaschk | Florian Lux
Proceedings of the First NLPL Workshop on Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing

This paper discusses methods to improve the performance of text classification on data that is difficult to classify due to a large number of unbalanced classes with noisy examples. A variety of features are tested, in combination with three different neural-network-based methods with increasing complexity. The classifiers are applied to a songtext–artist dataset which is large, unbalanced and noisy. We come to the conclusion that substantial improvement can be obtained by removing unbalancedness and sparsity from the data. This fulfils a classification task unsatisfactorily—however, with contemporary methods, it is a practical step towards fairly satisfactory results.