Unsupervised speech recognition ({pasted macro ‘ASRU’}/) is the problem of learning automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems from unpaired speech-only and text-only corpora. While various algorithms exist to solve this problem, a theoretical framework is missing to study their properties and address such issues as sensitivity to hyperparameters and training instability. In this paper, we proposed a general theoretical framework to study the properties of {pasted macro ‘ASRU’}/ systems based on random matrix theory and the theory of neural tangent kernels. Such a framework allows us to prove various learnability conditions and sample complexity bounds of {pasted macro ‘ASRU’}/. Extensive {pasted macro ‘ASRU’}/ experiments on synthetic languages with three classes of transition graphs provide strong empirical evidence for our theory (code available at https://github.com/cactuswiththoughts/UnsupASRTheory.gitcactuswiththoughts/UnsupASRTheory.git).

Neural language models have achieved superior performance. However, these models also suffer from the pathology of overconfidence in the out-of-distribution examples, potentially making the model difficult to interpret and making the interpretation methods fail to provide faithful attributions. In this paper, we explain the model pathology from the view of sentence representation and argue that the counter-intuitive bias degree and direction of the out-of-distribution examples’ representation cause the pathology. We propose a Contrastive learning regularization method using Adversarial examples for Alleviating the Pathology (ConAAP), which calibrates the sentence representation of out-of-distribution examples. ConAAP generates positive and negative examples following the attribution results and utilizes adversarial examples to introduce direction information in regularization. Experiments show that ConAAP effectively alleviates the model pathology while slightly impacting the generalization ability on in-distribution examples and thus helps interpretation methods obtain more faithful results.

Existing supervised sign language recognition systems rely on an abundance of well-annotated data. Instead, an unsupervised speech-to-sign language recognition (SSR-U) system learns to translate between spoken and sign languages by observing only non-parallel speech and sign-language corpora. We propose speech2sign-U, a neural network-based approach capable of both character-level and word-level SSR-U. Our approach significantly outperforms baselines directly adapted from unsupervised speech recognition (ASR-U) models by as much as 50% recall@10 on several challenging American sign language corpora with various levels of sample sizes, vocabulary sizes, and audio and visual variability. The code is available at https://github.com/cactuswiththoughts/UnsupSpeech2Sign.gitcactuswiththoughts/UnsupSpeech2Sign.git.

Neural language models are vulnerable to word-level adversarial text attacks, which generate adversarial examples by directly substituting discrete input words. Previous search methods for word-level attacks assume that the information in the important words is more influential on prediction than unimportant words. In this paper, motivated by this assumption, we propose a self-supervised regularization method for Similarizing the Influence of Words with Contrastive Learning (SIWCon) that encourages the model to learn sentence representations in which words of varying importance have a more uniform influence on prediction. Experiments show that SIWCon is compatible with various training methods and effectively improves model robustness against various unforeseen adversarial attacks. The effectiveness of SIWCon is also intuitively shown through qualitative analysis and visualization of the loss landscape, sentence representation, and changes in model confidence.

Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples. The adversary can successfully attack a model even without knowing model architecture and parameters, i.e., under a black-box scenario. Previous works on word-level attacks widely use word importance ranking (WIR) methods and complex search methods, including greedy search and heuristic algorithms, to find optimal substitutions. However, these methods fail to balance the attack success rate and the cost of attacks, such as the number of queries to the model and the time consumption. In this paper, We propose PAthological woRd Saliency sEarch (PARSE) that performs the search under dynamic search space following the subarea importance. Experiments show that PARSE can achieve comparable attack success rates to complex search methods while saving numerous queries and time, e.g., saving at most 74% of queries and 90% of time compared with greedy search when attacking the examples from Yelp dataset. The adversarial examples crafted by PARSE are also of high quality, highly transferable, and can effectively improve model robustness in adversarial training.

Phonemes are defined by their relationship to words: changing a phoneme changes the word. Learning a phoneme inventory with little supervision has been a longstanding challenge with important applications to under-resourced speech technology. In this paper, we bridge the gap between the linguistic and statistical definition of phonemes and propose a novel neural discrete representation learning model for self-supervised learning of phoneme inventory with raw speech and word labels. Under mild assumptions, we prove that the phoneme inventory learned by our approach converges to the true one with an exponentially low error rate. Moreover, in experiments on TIMIT and Mboshi benchmarks, our approach consistently learns a better phoneme-level representation and achieves a lower error rate in a zero-resource phoneme recognition task than previous state-of-the-art self-supervised representation learning algorithms.

Neural networks are widely used in various NLP tasks for their remarkable performance. However, the complexity makes them difficult to interpret, i.e., they are not guaranteed right for the right reason. Besides the complexity, we reveal that the model pathology - the inconsistency between word saliency and model confidence, further hurts the interpretability. We show that the pathological inconsistency is caused by the representation collapse issue, which means that the representation of the sentences with tokens in different saliency reduced is somehow collapsed, and thus the important words cannot be distinguished from unimportant words in terms of model confidence changing. In this paper, to mitigate the pathology and obtain more interpretable models, we propose Pathological Contrastive Training (PCT) framework, which adopts contrastive learning and saliency-based samples augmentation to calibrate the sentences representation. Combined with qualitative analysis, we also conduct extensive quantitative experiments and measure the interpretability with eight reasonable metrics. Experiments show that our method can mitigate the model pathology and generate more interpretable models while keeping the model performance. Ablation study also shows the effectiveness.

Event coreference resolution is critical to understand events in the growing number of online news with multiple modalities including text, video, speech, etc. However, the events and entities depicting in different modalities may not be perfectly aligned and can be difficult to annotate, which makes the task especially challenging with little supervision available. To address the above issues, we propose a supervised model based on attention mechanism and an unsupervised model based on statistical machine translation, capable of learning the relative importance of modalities for event coreference resolution. Experiments on a video multimedia event dataset show that our multimodal models outperform text-only systems in event coreference resolution tasks. A careful analysis reveals that the performance gain of the multimodal model especially under unsupervised settings comes from better learning of visually salient events.