Exploratory Evaluation of Speech Content Masking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Williams, Jennifer, Pizzi, Karla, Noe, Paul-Gauthier, Das, Sneha
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Williams, Jennifer
Pizzi, Karla
Noe, Paul-Gauthier
Das, Sneha
author_facet Williams, Jennifer
Pizzi, Karla
Noe, Paul-Gauthier
Das, Sneha
contents Most recent speech privacy efforts have focused on anonymizing acoustic speaker attributes but there has not been as much research into protecting information from speech content. We introduce a toy problem that explores an emerging type of privacy called "content masking" which conceals selected words and phrases in speech. In our efforts to define this problem space, we evaluate an introductory baseline masking technique based on modifying sequences of discrete phone representations (phone codes) produced from a pre-trained vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) and re-synthesized using WaveRNN. We investigate three different masking locations and three types of masking strategies: noise substitution, word deletion, and phone sequence reversal. Our work attempts to characterize how masking affects two downstream tasks: automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic speaker verification (ASV). We observe how the different masks types and locations impact these downstream tasks and discuss how these issues may influence privacy goals.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_03936
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploratory Evaluation of Speech Content Masking
Williams, Jennifer
Pizzi, Karla
Noe, Paul-Gauthier
Das, Sneha
Audio and Speech Processing
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Sound
Most recent speech privacy efforts have focused on anonymizing acoustic speaker attributes but there has not been as much research into protecting information from speech content. We introduce a toy problem that explores an emerging type of privacy called "content masking" which conceals selected words and phrases in speech. In our efforts to define this problem space, we evaluate an introductory baseline masking technique based on modifying sequences of discrete phone representations (phone codes) produced from a pre-trained vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) and re-synthesized using WaveRNN. We investigate three different masking locations and three types of masking strategies: noise substitution, word deletion, and phone sequence reversal. Our work attempts to characterize how masking affects two downstream tasks: automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic speaker verification (ASV). We observe how the different masks types and locations impact these downstream tasks and discuss how these issues may influence privacy goals.
title Exploratory Evaluation of Speech Content Masking
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03936