Paper ID: 2204.05148

Speech Sequence Embeddings using Nearest Neighbors Contrastive Learning

Robin Algayres, Adel Nabli, Benoit Sagot, Emmanuel Dupoux

We introduce a simple neural encoder architecture that can be trained using an unsupervised contrastive learning objective which gets its positive samples from data-augmented k-Nearest Neighbors search. We show that when built on top of recent self-supervised audio representations, this method can be applied iteratively and yield competitive SSE as evaluated on two tasks: query-by-example of random sequences of speech, and spoken term discovery. On both tasks our method pushes the state-of-the-art by a significant margin across 5 different languages. Finally, we establish a benchmark on a query-by-example task on the LibriSpeech dataset to monitor future improvements in the field.

Submitted: Apr 11, 2022